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Melly Sews

Melly Sews

Pintucks and handkerchief skirt tutorial

by 9 Comments

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As seen on CraftGossip.comhomemade crafts

Today I’m going to show you how I did the pintucks and the handkerchief skirt for the Pintucked Poppies Dress. Both techniques are super easy, but look great when finished.
I used about 2 yards of 60″ cotton interlock knit fabric for this dress.
For the pintucks, I marked out a bunch of lines 1/2 inch apart. I folded my fabric on one of the lines, and set my needle to the right.

Then sew right along the edge of the fabric. If you pin, you’re going to want to pull the pins as you go instead of sewing over them.

When you open it up, you get a pretty pintuck.

To do the top of the dress, I used a basic t-shirt pattern (if you don’t know how to make one, check out my tutorial here – if you read all the way through, there’s a free size 2-4 t-shirt pattern too)

The trick to pintucking this top was to sew all the pintucks first on a rectangular piece of fabric, then center the t-shirt pattern on it and cut out the t-shirt.

I think handkerchief skirts are gorgeous. So much movement and texture. They’re also easy (if time consuming) to make.
First, you have to cut out a bunch of squares. Figure on about one square per inch of skirt width in this case. So for my dress, which was 21 inches around, I cut out 21 squares for each layer. The rotary cutter really came in handy for this.

You’ll notice the squares above have one point cut off. I used the 45 degree line on my cutting board and cut so that the new edge was about 1 1/2 inches wide. For the final skirt, which was about a size 2T, I used 6×6 inch squares and 9×9 inch squares. The ones pictured above are actually the 4 inch squares that I didn’t end up using since I decided 3 layers would be too heavy.

To sew together, you lay them out like this:

Since I was using knit interlock, I didn’t worry about finishing the seams or the hem. Sew with a narrow seam.
When you open them out so that the cut-off points are straight across, you get the wonderful handkerchief effect.

Continue to sew squares together until your skirt width around the top is the same as the circumference of your top. Sew the last two sides together so you have a circle formed out of squares.  Then flip it inside out and attach it to your top the same way you would attach any skirt to a bodice.

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Comments

  3. Mama Lusco

    Thanks for the tutorial. I haven’t sewn pintucks yet but they don’t look so scary now 🙂 I pinned this @Mama Lusco. Thank you!

    Reply

  6. Brittany

    Wow! This is simply adorable! Another reason I need to re-learn my sewing machine. Love the green too!

    Brittany (www.tiptopnest.com)

    Reply

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