How to make a tulle bedskirt for an IKEA doll’s bed

How do you make a tulle bedskirt more poofy?  You make it with more tulle!  And for the IKEA Duktig doll’s bed that I painted and have already made another tulle bedskirt for, 4 yards of tulle seemed to do the trick!  Baby Alive is going to sleep in the lap of luxury in this little doll’s bed when I finish all the pillows and accessories:

Leah’s birthday is at the end of the month, so I’m going to be busy making all the bed linens for the IKEA Duktig doll’s bed this week.  I’m sure there will be a few more tutorials to come!

How to make a tulle bedskirt for an IKEA Duktig doll’s bed

For the first tutu bedskirt I made for this doll’s bed, I only used 1.5 yards of tulle, and it just wasn’t enough.  For reference, when I made the tutu bedskirt for Leah’s twin bed, I used 13 yards of tulle.

As I said above, this time, I used 4 yards of blue tulle that was 60″ wide.  Unfortunately spools of tulle weren’t available at my fabric store, so I had to cut it all.  Spools would have been WAY easier to work with!

So if you can’t get spools of tulle either, fold the 60″ wide tulle in half and safety pin it every foot or two to help keep it straight:

Lay it all out on the floor, and fold it in half again and remove and repin all of the safety pins:

Fold it in half a third time and re-pin the safety pins one last time:

Sew a wide basting stitch across the length of tulle, making sure not to back stitch anything:

Every yard or so pull the tulle out of the machine, pull out some thread, then keep basting from roughly the same spot you left off at.  This way you’ll later be able to gather from the middle and not just the ends.  Trust me, this helps a lot:

Now that everything is basted and held in place, cut the tulle.  Since it was folded three times, there will be a nice fold you can run your scissors down to cut all layers at once:

Pull one of the threads to gather the tulle.  As I said in yesterday’s post about the first doll’s bed tutu bedskirt, only pull one of the threads or it won’t gather.  And be sure to keep pulling the same thread or the stitches will tighten into a knot:

After it’s all gathered, the 4 yards of tulle will look something like this:

Cut a piece of fabric to cover the base of the doll’s bed.  I only made the fabric half an inch larger, but I would suggest making it a full inch larger on all sides because mine was kind of snug:

This is just the cotton fabric used for men’s dress shirts (it was on sale):

Pin the tulle to the white fabric stretching and gathering where needed to make it fit:

Sew the tulle onto the white fabric.  Just be careful that you keep everything as flat as you can so you don’t inadvertently sew things together that shouldn’t be sewn together (I came really close a couple times):

You can see in the photo below that a little extra white fabric would have been helpful to make it fit over the base and into the bed a little easier:

You can see the stripes in the men’s dress shirt fabric here:

I’m really happy with how it turned out!

I still have to make the IKEA doll’s bed linens, so this is just the fabric folded up over top of it, but it’s going to be so cute!

I’m going to be busy making all the doll accessories before Leah’s 3rd birthday!

You can see here how it goes with the Benjamin Moore’s Bird’s Egg paint colour that her room is painted:

I’m MUCH happier with this tutu bedskirt for the doll’s bed!  It’s much poofier and with all the layers of tulle (8 layers total) it’s not see through at all.  I would have loved to use this method for Leah’s twin bed’s tulle bedskirt, but it would have been INSANE to gather 13 yards worth of tulle.  Totally possible and it would look gorgeous, but it just wasn’t a challenge I was up to.

Now for 4 yards of tulle on the other hand, it was way more manageable and it made a beautifully textured tulle bedskirt just the right size for this IKEA doll’s bed.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the tutorial for how to make a tulle bedskirt for a twin size bed: