Easy Denim Tiered Dress

Tools and materials:

• 1 denim shirt
• 3 pairs of denim jeans (or more, depending on how long you want your dress)
• Scissors
• Pins
• Thread
• Sewing machine

Deconstruct the jeans

Cut the legs off all three of your pairs of jeans. leaving enough of the leg intact so you can still use your jeans as cut-off shorts if you want to. 

Tip:

Now, cut the hems off of the jeans, and then cut out the thick side seams from the jeans. Now you have four strips of denim from each pair of jeans, and four strips are exactly what you need for one tier of ruffle.

Lay the four strips from one pair of jeans on top of each other and trim them together so that they are all exactly the same size. Repeat with the strips from the other two pairs of jeans.

Create the ruffles

Stitch all four strips from one pair of jeans together, right sides facing in, along the short edge. Now you have one very long strip of denim. Stitch the two ends of the long strip together, right side facing in, so you have one large circular piece of denim. Repeat this process with your other two pairs of jeans. Now you have three ruffle pieces.

Arrange the ruffles

Lay your denim shirt on your worktable. Now lay the three ruffle pieces on the bottom of your shirt in the order that you want them to fall on your tiered dress (smallest to largest as you go down.) You can see how your tiered ruffle dress is going to look now!

Attach the ruffles

If your sewing machine can do gather stitches, then sew a gather stitch along the top edge of each ruffle. If your sewing machine can’t do gather stitches, then make pin-tucks in the ruffle as I did in the video at 3:45.

If you want a deconstructed look with visible frays on the tiers, sew the ruffles on with right sides out, not facing in as you’d normally sew seams. Sew the first ruffle to the bottom of the shirt. Sew the second ruffle to the bottom of the first ruffle, and the third ruffle to the bottom of the second.

That’s all there is to it! You’ve made an adorable, swingy, denim tiered dress. And it’s super comfortable! For more tutorials head over to my Confessions of a Refashionista website ♥