How to Make a Scrunchie (From Someone Who Makes Them All Day)
A scrunchie is the first thing many people sew, and rightly so — it is a tube, a piece of elastic and two seams. You can make one in twenty minutes.
Making a good one is slightly harder, and the difference is almost entirely in four decisions that most tutorials skip. We make these for a living, so here is what we have learned, including the parts we got wrong for a while.
What you need
- A strip of fabric, roughly 55 × 12 cm for a regular scrunchie. For an
oversized one, go to about 70 × 18 cm.
- Elastic, about 20–22 cm. More on this below, because it matters more than
anything else here.
- A safety pin, thread, scissors, and a sewing machine. It can be done by hand;
it takes longer and the seams are less even, but it works perfectly well.
The four things that actually matter
1. The elastic — genuinely the most important choice
Most tutorials say "elastic" and move on. This is the decision that determines whether your scrunchie still works in a year.
Narrow elastic (3–5 mm) is easy to thread and produces a soft, gentle scrunchie. It also loses its recovery quickly. After a few months it stops springing back and starts sliding down the ponytail.
Wide elastic (8–10 mm) is considerably more annoying to thread through a tube of slippery satin. It also grips properly, holds heavy hair, and lasts far longer. We use wide elastic in everything we make, and it is the thing customers most often write to thank us for.
If you take one thing from this page: use wider elastic than you think you need.
2. Enough fabric
The gather is the scrunchie. A strip that is too short produces something thin and apologetic that looks like a hair tie with ambitions.
The ratio to hold on to is roughly two and a half times the finished circumference. Cut it long. Fabric is the cheap part.
3. Fabric weight
This is what separates a scrunchie that keeps its shape from one that goes limp.
Hold your fabric over the back of your hand. Good cloth falls in a soft curve. Thin cloth sticks out flat. Thin satin gathers into hard little points and collapses after a few washes; a weighted satin gathers into full rounded folds and still looks like itself after a hundred wears.
The same test works for everything.
4. Enclosed seams
Satin frays enthusiastically. So does taffeta, and brocade is worse. If you leave a raw edge inside, it will unravel with wear and you will find threads working their way out within weeks.
Sewing the tube right sides together and turning it through encloses everything. It is the step that takes the extra ten minutes and it is the reason a well-made scrunchie survives.
The method
- Cut your strip — 55 × 12 cm for regular.
- Fold lengthways, right sides together, and pin along the long edge.
- Sew the long seam with about a 1 cm allowance, leaving a gap of 3–4 cm
in the middle. You will need it later. Do not forget it, as we have.
- Turn it through — a safety pin or a knitting needle helps. This is fiddly.
It is fiddly for us too.
- Thread the elastic with a safety pin on one end. Pin the free end to the
fabric so it cannot vanish inside, which it will otherwise do.
- Overlap the elastic ends by about 2 cm and sew them together firmly.
Zig-zag if your machine does it. This joint is where scrunchies fail.
- Close the tube — bring the two short ends together, tuck one inside the
other, and stitch round.
- Slip-stitch the gap closed by hand. A few minutes, and it is the difference
between neat and homemade.
Which fabrics behave
Easy and forgiving: cotton. Any decent quilting or dressmaking cotton. It does not slip under the foot, it presses beautifully, and it barely frays. Start here.
Lovely but demanding: satin. It slides while you sew, frays as you cut, and shows every needle mark. Pin more than feels reasonable and use a fine needle.
Surprisingly forgiving: velvet — but you must cut every piece with the nap running the same way, or your finished scrunchie will be two different shades. Never press it; an iron flattens the pile permanently.
For the confident: taffeta holds volume better than anything and is the best choice for an oversized scrunchie. It creases if crushed and it remembers.
Avoid for a first attempt: chiffon. It is beautiful and it needs several layers, which means more fabric, more slipping and more patience.
Where to buy fabric
If you are in London, Goldhawk Road in Shepherd's Bush is a run of fabric shops that has supplied fashion students and costume departments for decades. Ask about roll ends — the metre or two left at the end of a bolt, usually a fraction of the price. A scrunchie needs so little that roll ends are almost always enough.
We wrote a proper guide to the street here: → Goldhawk Road: A Maker's Guide
If you would rather not
Entirely reasonable. We make these by hand in West London, in silk velvets, weighted satins, taffetas and printed cottons, mostly from roll ends found a few doors from the studio.
Either way — do use the wider elastic.