How To Make a Homemade Tutu Skirt

I know I'm not the only person to have seen those tutu skirts floating around Pinterest. I think they are just about the most adorable things ever!

Last year when we decided to dress the kids up as Superheroes for Halloween, I knew instantly that I wanted the girls to have the tutu skirts as part of the outfits! There was only one problem: They are so expensive!

So it became necessary to make my own (because the idea of scratching the tutu idea never occurred to me.) After much research and trial and error, I finally figured out how to make a decent one...with no sewing required! If you know how to make a knot, then this will be a piece of cake! The skirts ended up being the easiest part of making their costumes...by far!

Items needed:
-Bolt of tulle in your main color. 5-6 yards should be enough unless you are making a skirt for a tall girl.
-Extra tulle in an accent color. 2-3 yards should give you a little extra.
-Extra tulle for the belt area. 2 yards so that you have a strip long enough. Save the extra for another skirt!
-Thin Headband (I picked up a six pack of Goody brand headbands for a couple of dollars)
-Scissors
-Roll of Paper Towels (or something else to use as a form for the tutu)
-A Board or something else that you can wrap tulle around. It should be twice as long as you want the skirt to be (not pictured)

You have two options with the tulle. You can buy them in pre-cut spools and skip the following steps, but it is more pricey. My goal was to save money, so I opted to cut my own tulle. You can get great deals on it by watching sales!

Unroll the tulle from the cardboard bolt and re-roll it evenly.

Here is the re-rolled tulle off the cardboard (so that you can cut through it!).

Now you are going to cut the tulle into four even sections. This will make super long stripes of tulle once it's unrolled. I put some pencils on the material below so that you can see where I made my cuts. The blue pencil marks that you will want to cut along the edge because that is the fold.

The four sections are roughly six inches wide each. Do not get caught up in making sure they are exactly the same. It's a waste of time since the whole point is to have a full and floofy skirt at the end!

If you bought a pre-cut spool of tulle, this is where you will pick back up in the tutorial. You still need to do the following steps to make shorter lengths to tie onto the skirt.

Working with one section at a time, unroll it around an item that is twice as long as you would like the skirt to be. I used the top of a tote. I first cut a bunch of tulle using the short side and the skirts were ridiculously short on my 18 month olds. I had to re-cut everything on the long side.  (I told you there was trial and error!)

Cut on both sides of the board or tote lid to make the stripes that you will tie onto the skirt.

Now you have two sections of tulle ready to be tied on. No need to keep them separate at this point. Just wanted to show you how nicely the tote lid makes uniform strips. Cut the rest of your strips in the same manner until everything is this uniform size.

Now the fun part! Grab your headband and paper towel roll. It's time to start tying!

Take two strips stacked together for each knot since the tulle is a little transparent. You can even do three strips together if you are feeling really daring!

Fold the strip in half and put it loop end down behind your headband.

Tuck the ends through the loop...

...and pull through.

Don't tighten it quite yet!

Tuck the ends through the same loop one more time.

Then tighten the knot down. Be careful not to tighten it too much or you will stretch the headband out.

That's it! Pretty simple! Keep going all the way around until you have a bunch of close knots and lots of gorgeous tulle.

I didn't do it with the skirt that is pictured, but you can also incorporate accent colors. I used an accent color for every third knot when I was making the girls' Halloween costumes. If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you can see the skirts with the accent colors in them.

Once you have your tulle knots all the way around, you want to use a complimenting color for the waistband. The easiest way to do this is to take a very long piece of tulle, roughly six inches across, and start wrapping from the mid-point. It keeps the tulle length even on both sides so that you can tie a bow at the back.

With your mid-point found, wrap one side of the tulle between each knot.

Then go back to your mid-point and work your way the other direction, wrapping the tulle between each knot.

This is what the front looks like when it is wrapped.

And this is the back with a pretty bow to finish things off!

And here is Abby modeling a finished Tutu Skirt as part of her Halloween costume! The one she is wearing is red with blue accents so that you can see how pretty they look with the extra colors in them. Quick, easy, cheap, and fun! Do you want to see how the rest of our superhero costumes turned out for our quadruplets? Click HERE to jump to the post from last October!

Don't forget to Pin this!  

Goodness, looking at those photos makes me realize how quickly they grow up! Hopefully they let me dress them up awhile longer before they start having their own opinion. 

I know I'm not the only person to have seen those tutu skirts floating around Pinterest. I think they are just about the most adorable things ever!

Last year when we decided to dress the kids up as Superheroes for Halloween, I knew instantly that I wanted the girls to have the tutu skirts as part of the outfits! There was only one problem: They are so expensive!

So it became necessary to make my own (because the idea of scratching the tutu idea never occurred to me.) After much research and trial and error, I finally figured out how to make a decent one...with no sewing required! If you know how to make a knot, then this will be a piece of cake! The skirts ended up being the easiest part of making their costumes...by far!

Items needed:
-Bolt of tulle in your main color. 5-6 yards should be enough unless you are making a skirt for a tall girl.
-Extra tulle in an accent color. 2-3 yards should give you a little extra.
-Extra tulle for the belt area. 2 yards so that you have a strip long enough. Save the extra for another skirt!
-Thin Headband (I picked up a six pack of Goody brand headbands for a couple of dollars)
-Scissors
-Roll of Paper Towels (or something else to use as a form for the tutu)
-A Board or something else that you can wrap tulle around. It should be twice as long as you want the skirt to be (not pictured)

You have two options with the tulle. You can buy them in pre-cut spools and skip the following steps, but it is more pricey. My goal was to save money, so I opted to cut my own tulle. You can get great deals on it by watching sales!

Unroll the tulle from the cardboard bolt and re-roll it evenly.

Here is the re-rolled tulle off the cardboard (so that you can cut through it!).

Now you are going to cut the tulle into four even sections. This will make super long stripes of tulle once it's unrolled. I put some pencils on the material below so that you can see where I made my cuts. The blue pencil marks that you will want to cut along the edge because that is the fold.

The four sections are roughly six inches wide each. Do not get caught up in making sure they are exactly the same. It's a waste of time since the whole point is to have a full and floofy skirt at the end!

If you bought a pre-cut spool of tulle, this is where you will pick back up in the tutorial. You still need to do the following steps to make shorter lengths to tie onto the skirt.

Working with one section at a time, unroll it around an item that is twice as long as you would like the skirt to be. I used the top of a tote. I first cut a bunch of tulle using the short side and the skirts were ridiculously short on my 18 month olds. I had to re-cut everything on the long side.  (I told you there was trial and error!)

Cut on both sides of the board or tote lid to make the stripes that you will tie onto the skirt.

Now you have two sections of tulle ready to be tied on. No need to keep them separate at this point. Just wanted to show you how nicely the tote lid makes uniform strips. Cut the rest of your strips in the same manner until everything is this uniform size.

Now the fun part! Grab your headband and paper towel roll. It's time to start tying!

Take two strips stacked together for each knot since the tulle is a little transparent. You can even do three strips together if you are feeling really daring!

Fold the strip in half and put it loop end down behind your headband.

Tuck the ends through the loop...

...and pull through.

Don't tighten it quite yet!

Tuck the ends through the same loop one more time.

Then tighten the knot down. Be careful not to tighten it too much or you will stretch the headband out.

That's it! Pretty simple! Keep going all the way around until you have a bunch of close knots and lots of gorgeous tulle.

I didn't do it with the skirt that is pictured, but you can also incorporate accent colors. I used an accent color for every third knot when I was making the girls' Halloween costumes. If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you can see the skirts with the accent colors in them.

Once you have your tulle knots all the way around, you want to use a complimenting color for the waistband. The easiest way to do this is to take a very long piece of tulle, roughly six inches across, and start wrapping from the mid-point. It keeps the tulle length even on both sides so that you can tie a bow at the back.

With your mid-point found, wrap one side of the tulle between each knot.

Then go back to your mid-point and work your way the other direction, wrapping the tulle between each knot.

This is what the front looks like when it is wrapped.

And this is the back with a pretty bow to finish things off!

And here is Abby modeling a finished Tutu Skirt as part of her Halloween costume! The one she is wearing is red with blue accents so that you can see how pretty they look with the extra colors in them. Quick, easy, cheap, and fun! Do you want to see how the rest of our superhero costumes turned out for our quadruplets? Click HERE to jump to the post from last October!

Don't forget to Pin this!  

Goodness, looking at those photos makes me realize how quickly they grow up! Hopefully they let me dress them up awhile longer before they start having their own opinion. 

How to Bathe Multiples FAST!

This is the first installment in an awesome series that's I'm going to call, "How do they do it?" We have had so many people ask how we do the basics with quadruplets like bathing, feeding, bedtime, etc. Lots of blogs have tutorials, so in similar fashion, here is our Bathing Quadruplets FAST Tutorial!

You know, in case you ever find yourself completely outnumbered by babies on a regular basis. :)

First of all, figure out a way to corral all of the kids. Before they started crawling, we could just throw a bunch of blankets down on the floor of our room for them to lie on. Now that they are mobile, we use the Superyard XT Gate to keep them contained. Much easier than pulling them out of the closet, or dragging them back out from under our bed. Both are kind of dusty and someday I need to get around to cleaning them.

Throw some blankets down inside the play yard along with a few toys to keep them entertained.

Line up all of their clothes along the edge of the bed. I always put them in birth order to make it easy to keep track of who wears what.

Add the correct size diaper on top of the clothes. Our kids wear different sizes and we don't want to accidentally put too small of a diaper on a kid. Leaks are no good if they've just had a bath (okay, are leaks ever good??)

And then their towel and washcloth go on top. So now each kid has their stack in the order in which they will use the items: wash cloth in bath tub, towel dry off, diaper on, then socks, and finally clothes. No digging around while you have a bare butt crawling away from you.

This is also the point where I realized that I didn't have the correct setting on the camera flash. :)

Set up a diaper changing/lotioning station. Notice that this station is right next to their clothes. Keep it simple!

Put some water in your tub with some toys. I figured out that while squirty water toys are fun, they get very slippery. The kids are happier if the toys have rings that they can hold onto. Bath time goes quicker if you aren't chasing toys AND trying to wash kids.

Strip the kids and put them in the play yard.

This is the part where tag-teaming really comes in handy! One person strips off diapers, brings them to the tub, and then dries them off, lotions them down, and dresses them. The other person sits in the tub and scrubs away. In our case, I wash them and Sean dresses them. Sitting in the tub works best since I can brace them with my legs and scrub them down quickly.

This is what it looks like:
1) Mommy is handed Abby. She starts washing her.
2) Then Daddy dries, diapers, lotions, and dresses Caleb who just finished his bath.
3) Caleb goes back in the play yard.
4) Daddy goes back to the tub to get Abby. Abby goes into the play yard sans diaper for a minute while Daddy strips the diaper off of Elijah. Mommy, meanwhile, has changed out the bath water and is ready when Daddy passes Elijah into the tub.
5) Then Mommy washes Elijah while Daddy dries, diapers, lotions, and dresses Abby.
6) Continue until all babies are clean.

It's also important to take a few minutes to play with them as you go! Hehe! I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure this photo of Ellie is included in her wedding slideshow. :-)

Tip: Make it easy on yourself and put a laundry basket right outside the bedroom door for wet towels as you finish with them. After baths are done, everything is easily carried to the washer.

And this is the finished project! Clean, relaxed, tired babies! They always take great naps after baths!

Elijah

Daddy and Ellie

Caleb and Abby

Sean and I can give our quadruplets baths in 40 minutes by doing it this way. That includes set up, baths, and clean up which is pretty darn fast, in my opinion! We've tried baths in the baby bathtub, sink, with them in the big bathtub and us leaning over the edge, and showering. This is by far the easiest, quickest way to get through all of them.

By the way, this also works for a singleton, just without all of the repeats. :)

This is the first installment in an awesome series that's I'm going to call, "How do they do it?" We have had so many people ask how we do the basics with quadruplets like bathing, feeding, bedtime, etc. Lots of blogs have tutorials, so in similar fashion, here is our Bathing Quadruplets FAST Tutorial!

You know, in case you ever find yourself completely outnumbered by babies on a regular basis. :)

First of all, figure out a way to corral all of the kids. Before they started crawling, we could just throw a bunch of blankets down on the floor of our room for them to lie on. Now that they are mobile, we use the Superyard XT Gate to keep them contained. Much easier than pulling them out of the closet, or dragging them back out from under our bed. Both are kind of dusty and someday I need to get around to cleaning them.

Throw some blankets down inside the play yard along with a few toys to keep them entertained.

Line up all of their clothes along the edge of the bed. I always put them in birth order to make it easy to keep track of who wears what.

Add the correct size diaper on top of the clothes. Our kids wear different sizes and we don't want to accidentally put too small of a diaper on a kid. Leaks are no good if they've just had a bath (okay, are leaks ever good??)

And then their towel and washcloth go on top. So now each kid has their stack in the order in which they will use the items: wash cloth in bath tub, towel dry off, diaper on, then socks, and finally clothes. No digging around while you have a bare butt crawling away from you.

This is also the point where I realized that I didn't have the correct setting on the camera flash. :)

Set up a diaper changing/lotioning station. Notice that this station is right next to their clothes. Keep it simple!

Put some water in your tub with some toys. I figured out that while squirty water toys are fun, they get very slippery. The kids are happier if the toys have rings that they can hold onto. Bath time goes quicker if you aren't chasing toys AND trying to wash kids.

Strip the kids and put them in the play yard.

This is the part where tag-teaming really comes in handy! One person strips off diapers, brings them to the tub, and then dries them off, lotions them down, and dresses them. The other person sits in the tub and scrubs away. In our case, I wash them and Sean dresses them. Sitting in the tub works best since I can brace them with my legs and scrub them down quickly.

This is what it looks like:
1) Mommy is handed Abby. She starts washing her.
2) Then Daddy dries, diapers, lotions, and dresses Caleb who just finished his bath.
3) Caleb goes back in the play yard.
4) Daddy goes back to the tub to get Abby. Abby goes into the play yard sans diaper for a minute while Daddy strips the diaper off of Elijah. Mommy, meanwhile, has changed out the bath water and is ready when Daddy passes Elijah into the tub.
5) Then Mommy washes Elijah while Daddy dries, diapers, lotions, and dresses Abby.
6) Continue until all babies are clean.

It's also important to take a few minutes to play with them as you go! Hehe! I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure this photo of Ellie is included in her wedding slideshow. :-)

Tip: Make it easy on yourself and put a laundry basket right outside the bedroom door for wet towels as you finish with them. After baths are done, everything is easily carried to the washer.

And this is the finished project! Clean, relaxed, tired babies! They always take great naps after baths!

Elijah

Daddy and Ellie

Caleb and Abby

Sean and I can give our quadruplets baths in 40 minutes by doing it this way. That includes set up, baths, and clean up which is pretty darn fast, in my opinion! We've tried baths in the baby bathtub, sink, with them in the big bathtub and us leaning over the edge, and showering. This is by far the easiest, quickest way to get through all of them.

By the way, this also works for a singleton, just without all of the repeats. :)