Lengthening My Bedskirt

Hello, and happy Monday...

This weekend, I took on a little unplanned home project. I went to Hancock Fabrics on Saturday to pick up some trim for my curtains (more on that later). While I was perusing the fabric selection there, I came across this orange cotton fabric that was on sale. I loved the shade, and thought about what I could do with it in my bedroom.

Since I have started my bedroom redesign, I added risers from Target onto the bottom of the bed, to provide more storage (plus, I like the look of the taller bed). The only problem with it has been that the bedskirt, which is from Ikea, was about 4 inches too short. It's been bothering me for a few weeks, and I had actually done a little searching for extra long bedskirt on the internet.

I didn't find anything online that I thought would work. If I was going to buy a new bedskirt, I wanted it to at least be interesting and pretty, and nothing was fitting the bill. A little lightbulb went off when I saw this orange fabric at Hancock, though, and I decided to add onto the bottom of the bedskirt with it. I bought 2 yards of it.

Unfortunately, I was dumb and didn't take "before" pics of the short-ness -- you will have to imagine it. Not hard. Just imagine being able to see 4 inches of crap stored underneath the bed - not a good look.

here's how I did it, and the outcome:

Here are all of my supplies laying out. I bought Niagara brand starch, and got out my iron and my hot glue gun. If I had a sewing machine (that worked - note to self: have mine fixed asap), I'd have sewn it, but I didn't, so I just hot-glued everything in place. Obviously, this bedskirt is not something that I'm using and abusing often - it sits in place, and rarely gets touched, so it wasn't imperative that it be durably sewn together. Plus, I've used my hot glue gun on fabrics enough to know how to keep it from looking hot-glued. :)

I cut 3 long strips out of the fabric. I wanted about 4" added to the length of the bedskirt, so I cut each strip at 6". That gave me 1" to fold and glue under, and 1" to glue to the end of the current bedskirt, leaving me 4".

First, I sprayed the fabric strip with lots of starch, and folded the "bottom" end under and ironed it. This does a lot of the work for you. After that, I just hot glued into the fold, and pressed down. I did this all along the bottom end of all 3 long strips.

(PS Starch is amazing. Somehow, I've never used it. Hah! We were never much of an ironing family, so I never learned about the amazingness of starch. I love it now, though, and actually, when I started using it, it reminded me of how my Nana used to sew dresses and things for me when I was little, and she always used her hot iron and starch a lot in the process. :) )

hot gluing the ends under

Next, I just attached my orange piece to my bedskirt. Quite easy.

Folding the ends under, and starching/ironing/gluing just like I did with the other bits.

The hardest part of this project was taking the bedskirt on and off the bed! Not easy, but worth it. Check out my final results!

I'm really happy with the orange, because I had been wanting to add something else orange into the room (other than the lamps), and this was a really fun, unexpected touch.

I'm so happy that both the orange lamps and the orange on the bedskirt are the exact same!

The colors are a little nuts here, but this is the other side of the bed:

I'm particularly proud of the pleated areas. To get those to work properly, I just heavy starched them, and ironed them down really well.

Mika models, as usual.

Hope you like!

Just for fun (and maybe if you are new here), here are the other DIY projects I've taken on in this room, since painting it:

-Made the beadboard

-Made custom artwork

-Bought a vintage starburst mirror, and customized the metal color with some faux painting skillz

-Painted the lamps orange

-Painted the Ikea Lack shelves blue