Ruffle Flower Leggings Tutorial

Due to a couple of requests, I have put together a tutorial for these leggings inspired by J Crew. This time I made them for Bella, so I used some pearls. (Keep in mind if you use pearls on your leggings that a lot of labels on beads now say not to use them under a certain age.)

Here is the end result.  In my opinion, totally worth the time they take to make.

First, buy or make a pair of leggings.  I made mine using the tutorial at Made, but I stopped before adding the ruching and buttons.

Next, cut out a bunch of circles to make your flowers.  I did two slightly different sizes and cut out twelve of each.  I used six big circles and six little circles per leg.

To make the flowers, thread a needle and tie a knot. Do a long gathering stitch about 2/3 of the way in on your circle, like this:

Pull up your gathering stitches, making sure the "bubble" of fabric you create goes down to the back side of your flower:

Here is a view of the back with the bubble sticking out:

Tie your thread ends in a knot like so:

Here's a view of the front:

Now just start hand sewing the flowers to the bottom of your leggings, mixing up the sizes as you go.  I sewed the pearls onto the flowers as I went.  I also made sure to catch parts of the petals as I sewed other flowers on top of them so that they would sit a little more flatly on the leg:

Last step: Dress your little princess in them and go have some princess-worthy fun!

Just a note: These are quite simple to do, but they do take a long time.  I recommend watching a cute movie while you sew on the flowers.  Sewing on the flowers can get a little tricky as you move higher up the leg and don't have as much room to work with.  Make sure that you don't sew all the way through to the back of the leg (like I did several times), because, as we all know, pants with their legs sewn shut are not user-friendly.

Linking up here.