Turn Your Peplum Top Into a Tiered Dress!

The peplum pattern I will be using in this post is the Margot Peplum by Love Notions. I have a similar pattern that gave me this idea. It’s the Verbena dress by Blank Slate Patterns. It’s one of my favorite dress patterns, but I also like to keep my options open so I decided to use the Margot top to see if I could make a dress similar to the Verbena. So if you have a knit peplum top pattern like the Margot you could probably use it to make a tiered dress too.

What Pattern Options did I Use?

For this dress I used the Margot pattern's solid bodice with the swing style peplum. Although you could use the princess bodice and the gathered ruffle too. The swing style is much quicker since you don’t have to gather it. I wouldn’t recommend using the peated peplum option, but you do whatever you want.

For reference I am 5’ 5” and this is a size medium Margot top. I am using blue floral double brushed poly fabric from Joann. The website makes it look teal but it is a nice light blue shade. I like DBP because the edges don’t fray or unravel.

Making the Gathered Tier…

This peplum pattern swing piece needs two to be cut on the fold. That means it’s ¼ the size of the entire piece. I needed to know the full size of the peplum in order to make the gathered tier. To know that I measured the bottom of the pattern and multiplied that by 4. Then I took that measurement and multiplied it by 1 ¾ . Doing that gave me the measurement for how wide I needed the gathered tier to be. I just needed to decide on a length.

This dress is actually for my best friend who is about 4 inches shorter than me. She lives in a colder climate than I do so I wanted it to be longer than knee length on her. I decided that 20 inches would be a good length for the gathered tiered piece to be. So my tiered piece for this dress was: 126 inches wide x 20 inches long. You can give or take a few inches in the width of the tier, but try to keep it at least 1 ½ times bigger than the peplum ruffle it’s attaching to. It just depends on how much you want it gathered and how much fabric you have.

Attaching and Gathering the Tier…

Once you have the top part of the dress sewn together, mark the quarter points on the peplum ruffle. Sew together and mark the quarter points on the part to be gathered. Then do a basting stitch around the top part of the tier so you can gather it. I do this in 4 separate sections between the quarter points. That way I can gather them one section at a time.

After I have the basting stitches in, I match up the and pin in place the quarter points on the peplum and the bottom tier. Notice that I pin them wrong sides together. This is strictly preference. I like the look of the raw edge gathering.

After it’s pinned in place, I pull the threads and gather the bottom tier section by section. I use lots of pins to keep the gathers in place. Then I sew it together very carefully.

Finishing it Off…

Once the gathered tier is attached to the peplum I lay the dress flat and iron the raw edges up. Then I run another row of stitched across the ruffle again to keep the gathered edges flat. I finished it off with a ⅜ inch hem.

This turned out exactly as I expected. I completely fell in love with this little make! Now I must ship it off to its new home with my best friend where I’m sure she will love it even more than I do.

If you are 5' 5" like me and want a knee length dress you can add a 16.5 inch long tier to the peplum ruffle. That's what I did for the sunflowere dress. The Sunflower dress is the first one I made and it's made form the Verbena pattern.

Or if you prefer a maxi length a 26 inch long tier will do just fine. It's fun to play with length and have a few different options to wear.

Which length woud you choose, Knee length, Midi or Maxi? Let me know in the comments.

Happy sewing!!!