How to make ruffled (rose) sleeves

Ok ladies, and gentlemen it's time to get our sewing on! I posted my A rose is a rose, is a rose, is a rose dress with the feature of the dress being these sleeves that resemble ... can you guess? Roses. I thought I would take this opportunity to show you just how to make these sweet sleeves yourselves. Heck, why stop at sleeves? The possibilities are endless! An embellished skirt, bodice, elbows ... what ever tickles your fancy. Let's 3D the hell out of our new outfits!

Bear with me lovely people as this is my first tutorial, so be nice! Scroll down for the  detailed videos after reading the instructions.

Tools:

• Two cut out sleeve pieces - what ever style will best suit your dress! Cap sleeves, long sleeves short sleeves.
• Sewing machine
• Thread
• Scissors
• Fabric - you'll want to use a fabric that looks good on both the right and wrong sides of the fabric as both will be visible on your sleeves. Depending on what look you are after, it's better to use firmer fabrics such as cottons, dupion, taffeta, organza; fabrics that have a bit of body to them. Softer fabrics like chiffon and georgette would flop. Mind you, that could create an interesting effect ... ok.. focus.

Cutting the fabric

To make the ruffles we need to cut the fabric into long strips. These strips will be gathered and attached to our sleeves.

You'll notice on my sleeves that the edges of the ruffles are raw. It gives it that textured look which goes with the wildness of the ruffles. You'll notice though, that the edges aren't fraying all over the place and it's all got to do with how I cut the fabric.

There is one very important step to take when cutting your fabric in preparation for the ruffles, and that's to cut it on the bias. If you cut the fabric on the straight grain, it'll start fraying continuously until it resembles a hula skirt - and not in a good way.

I've shown a photo of silk dupion below, as the grain line in this fabric is the most visible. The black arrow shows the direction of the grain line. The red arrow shows the direction that you want to be cutting the fabric (the bias).

Look at the difference in the fabric edge cut on the straight grain and fabric edge cut on the bias. The fabric threads on the bias edge have got no where to go, they're packed in and contained. The straight grain look like they're having an identity crisis and trying to resemble spaghetti. Not a good look.

Cut the material into long strips on the bias. You can make them any width you like. The wider the strips, the fuller (and wider) your look will be. I chose to cut my strips 6 cm's wide. The actual width of each strip once attached to your sleeve will be half the width of the strip as we will be folding these strips in half. Therefore the ruffles on my sleeve  are actually 3 cm's wide. So keep that in mind for your cutting. If you want the ruffles to stick out 10 cm's, your strips are going to need to be 20 cm's wide. Got it?! As for the length of your sleeves there is no rule, you just need more of them if they're short so the longer the better.

All right! Once we've got our cut out strips, we are ready to prepare them for ruffling. The ruffles are created by pulling on a gathering stitch so our next step is .. yes you guessed it, a gathering stitch!

We want to create two rows of gathering stitches 1/4 inch on either side of the centre of our strips and sewn straight down the length of each strip of fabric. A gathering stitch is made using a large size stitch on your sewing machine. On my Janome I set the length of the stitch to 4 and reduce the tension of the thread to 3 to make it easier to 'gather-up' the stitches.

To define the centre of each strip of fabric, fold the strip in half all the way down the length of the strip and lightly press with an iron. This will mark the centre of the strip. Sew a loose stitch parallel to the centre mark 1/4 inch away on either side. Make sure you leave thread tails on either end to make it easier to gather up the stitches.

Once you have made two gathering stitches down the length of the strips, pull on the bobbin thread tails to gather up the fabric. Don't worry about making the gathers even. That's the beauty of this technique, is that the more irregularities the better! I gathered mine so that they were tighter in some spots and looser in others. You don't want to over gather your strips either, or you're going to run out of fabric real fast! 

The sleeve pieces

Now it's time to cut out and prepare our sleeve pieces. This is what we will be attaching the ruffles to.

Hem your sleeves before you attach the ruffles.  I've used black thread for so that my stitching lines are obvious.

Next, using chalk or one of those fancy pens that comes off with water, mark your seam allowance along the raw edges of your sleeve. My seam allowance is 1.5cm all the way around. We want to make sure when attaching our ruffles that we don't attach them within the seam allowance.

Now let's make us some roses! Watch the video to watch how I attach the make and attach the ruffles.

Video - Part 1

Video - Part 2

Hope you found this post helpful and good luck with your rose sleeves/embellishments!