Bed Skirt

I've been busy lately fixing up the house so we can have an appraisal scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Let's be honest, with interest rates so insanely low, who wouldn't want to save a few hundred bucks every month? We calculate paying our closing costs we would have made it worth our money in about 2 years. But I digress from sewing...

This weekend I rearranged our bedroom to make it look more open and spacious (well, as open and spacious as you can make a 12 by 12 foot room look). So I stuck the bed against the wall and stuffed all our extra junk under the bed. Stepping back and admiring our new arrangement I realized we are in serious need of a bed skirt.

So we took a trip to the thrift store and I found some navy blue knit for $2 (with more than enough yardage to make a bed skirt. I had an old bedskirt that didn't match our room or bedding that I pilfered the top of so I didn't have to buy any muslim.

I didn't just go out and buy a bed skirt because we have our bed on stilts. This makes it nice and tall for my over 6 foot husband, and it makes it so I can store our rarely used luggage under the bed. But it makes our bed substantially too tall for an average bed skirt.

A bed Skirt is pretty easy, but I wanted to walk you through the tough part.

Supplies:
Material to go between the mattress and the box spring (cut exactly the size of the bed)
Material to go around the bottom

First, measure the top of your bed to determine how much material you will need to go between the mattress and the box spring. Typical measurements are:

Crib/Toddler           27 x 52
Single                     39 x 75
Full                         54 x 75
Queen                    60 x 80
King                       76 x 80
California King      72 x 84

Second, measure from the top of your box spring to the floor. Now to determine how much material you'll need for the side of the bed you need to do some math.

I didn't want my bedskirt to be too ruffly, so I decided to put a pleat in the bottom every 6 inches (making the pleat 1 inch wide). This meant I had to add 2 inches of material for each 6 inches total (73 that I rounded up to 76 to account for piecing together and the edge). You can add more or less depending on how ruffly you want your bed skirt.

I have a queen sized bed, so I needed 80 (side) + 80 (side) + 60 (foot) + 76 (pleating) = 296 inches or 8.22 yards. BUT I was able to determine by how long I needed the material to be that I could get three lengths out of one cut of material, so I actually only needed 2.74 yards.

I cut my between piece the exact size of the bed because I wanted the colored bottom part to hang over so none of the white muslim showed. I also cut from box spring to the ground the exact measurement I needed. Because I didn't want the material hanging on the ground, the seam allowance and hemming of the bottom allowed this.

So all math and cutting aside, let's get started! Zigzag around the edges of your middle piece. Fold over twice the top (head of the bed) edge of your muslim and sew down. Around the sides and bottom of the colored material, fold over a half inch of material and sew down.

Now the more tricky part. To create the pleats, start on one end of the muslim. Pin the ends together (right sides facing each other, wrong sides out). Take a ruler and line it up from the end. Measure six inches and place your first one inch pleat. I made sure they were 1 inch apart by lining the pleat up with my ruler.

The rest of the pleats are a lot easier. Line up the crease of the previous pleat with the 6 inch mark on your ruler, then fold the material over the end of your ruler up to the 1 inch mark. Pin the material down and do the next pleat. Keep going around the edge of the bed until you're done!

Either sew two lines around, or use a double needle to sew around the just pinned edge. I used a 1/2 inch seam allowance for durability. Put your bed skirt on your bed and enjoy storing stuff without everyone knowing that's what you're doing!