Tutorial: Baby Girl's Shabby Chic Ruffle-Booty Onesie

This project is so easy. If I know you, then you probably have a daughter or a friend's daughter you can whip these up for.

It takes less than 30 minutes to make 4 onesies. What a great shower gift! You can use fabric scraps, too! If you have the mega-packs of white onesies lying around your home, you can make these babies for free. If not, check Walmart or Target. I think I have even got some from a $2.00 bin at Walgreens.

Materials:

Fabric Scraps, cut into (3) 1.5 x 15 inch strips. Coordinating fabrics look best
White or Colored Onesies
Matching Thread
Lots of Pins

1. Cut your scraps into strips. I like to tear mine for a shabby chic look. Just make a small (1/4 inch) snip 1.5 inches into your fabric piece and tear. This part is quite satisfying. R-r-r-r-ip your worries away! You will need three strips for each onesie.

2. Ruffle your strips. Here are three ways to ruffle:
a- use a ruffler foot
b- stitch two rows of long, straight stitches in the middle of your fabric, then gently tug one of the ends to gather the fabric uniformly
c- set your tension to "9" and choose your longest stitch (mine is 5.0). The combination of
these two things automatically ruffles the fabric on most machines. My girlfriend Krista's machine won't work this magic for her. My machine does it every time. Trial and error.

3. Make sure your strip is gathered in the middle of the fabric. Look at the picture below. The stitching runs down the dead center of the strip (.75 inches down a 1.5 inch strip). This way, each side is evenly ruff-ly.

4. Decide where you would like the strips to be situated on the booty of your onesie. We began our strips right above the leg opening. Tuck each end (right and left ends, not top and bottoms) under itself and pin. Then use a generous amount of pins all the way down the ruffle, taking care to make the ruffle as straight as possible across the onesie. (Do a better job than it looks like we did on this picture.)

5. Take the second ruffle in pin in the same fashion. We overlapped the top edge of the second ruffle with the bottom edge of the first ruffle.

6. Repeat with the third ruffle.
7. Make sure you reset your machine to sew a normal, straight stitch. Adjust your tension and your length. Now sew the ruffles to the onesie, taking care not to sew the pins. Remove as you come to them. The ruffles tend to hide pins, and you wouldn't want a sweet baby girl getting stuck with your wayward pin. Also take care not to catch the front of the onesie while you sew the back. This material is very stretchy, so you can manipulate while you sew the back. It will snap back to its original shape.
8. Indulge me and do another once-over to find that pin you couldn't see the first time. Then clip away any rogue threads. We liked to leave a little fray and thread on the fabric to capture the "shabby-chic" look we liked. As the new mommy washes the onesies, they will fray a little more. Perfectly shabby.
Thanks for reading! And thanks to Summer, who let me do this project with her. We had so much fun!