The itsy bitsy spider skirt tutorial

I got this great organic itsy bitsy spider fabric in a fabric grab bag from one of my favorite fabric websites (and no they don't pay me to say that, lol). It was a great surprise since my daughter loves spiders and her favorite color is purple. This fabric by itself was a little dull. So I decided to pair it with some very bright purple fabric that has a damask design on it. The pink in the middle is a super soft piece of 1 1/2" band elastic that also came from that grab bag.

First you need you waist measurement and your length measurement from hip to were you want the finished skirt to fall on the leg. It's simple to start just cute a rectangle the full width of your main fabric and the length you want it to be minus 3 inches . Then cut 2 pieces of fabric the full length of your trim fabric by 3 inches high. If you are using band elastic like the one I have hear it does not need to be encased so you don't need a seam allowance for the hem.

 
The picture above is what you should have sitting in front of you. Now you will need to sew the two trim pieces together at one end so you will have one very long piece of fabric. This is a good time to hem the bottom of your ruffle.

Next you will want to work on your ruffle. I use the two straight stitch method and then I pull one of the threads on the second stitch. If you use this method then your fabric will look like the picture below. Not sewn to anything else just two long running stitches. There are a lot of ways to make a ruffle though so do what works best for you. :-)

 

 Now after I have my running stitches but before I ruffle I pin it to my main fabric lengthwise. I start by pinning one end, then the other, then I find the middles and pin those. Continue by pinning the middle of the middles and so on until it looks like mine does below. Just remember to pin the two right sides of the fabric together.

 

 Once you get it all ruffled and even you can stitch it right now. It will then look like this.

I love the look of top stitching. I think it makes things look much nicer. If you like to iron then now is the time to do it. Then you can top stitch right above your ruffle. I did this in contrasting thread so you can see it better but you can use matching. 

 Now here is where I would change things. I pinned it straight to my elastic with the same middle of the middle method. However I did not do the running stitches to gather it up. I would highly recommend doing the running stitches and gathering it instead of just stretching the elastic to fit. That was very difficult to do and it made the stitching on my elastic band very wonky.

 After your elastic band is stitched on you can simply stitch the two sides together and you have a completed skirt. Just like the one below.

If you have a tag you can add it on the inside or the outside of the band like I did.
 

Then pop it on your little model and admire your work. As you can see I embellished a little shirt to go with this. It's pretty simple. I just took an old shirt she had spilled juice on and stitched on some lace with wise then I did the ruffle lengthwise.Hooray! Goodbye stain!