4 Ways To Hold A Bed Skirt In Place

Bed skirts offer the finishing touch to your bedding set, easing the transition and creating a cohesive look from top to bottom. They also hide the unattractive box spring and anything you tuck away under your bed for storage. But it's not always easy to keep your perfectly selected bed skirt in place. Several solutions exist to keep your bed skirt from slipping around and looking uneven.

Bed skirt pins basically are cork-screw-like fasteners with clear or invisible heads. When you have the skirt where you want it with the mattress in place, twist a bed skirt pin through the fabric into the box spring near each corner. Add a few more pins relatively evenly along the sides. The pack may come with a dozen pins — use them all.

Bed skirt pins are designed to hold the fabric safely in place, but damage can occur if you use the pins incorrectly or have an old or worn bed skirt or box spring. Refer to the pin manufacturer's label for directions and warnings. If you don't have bed skirt pins, you can use safety pins to attach the bed skirt to the box spring.

Self-sticking Velcro hook-and-loop tape works well at keeping a dust ruffle neatly in place. Cut eight tape lengths a few inches long — two for each corner of the box spring. Stick the tape lengths in a "V" shape, meeting in the corners. Tape the "mate" pieces to the bed skirt's underside corners, lining them up with the box spring's tape.

The tape's quick-release design makes it easy for you to remove the bed skirt for laundering. If you use different bedding sets throughout the year, attach hook-and-loop tape to the other bed skirts, if needed.

Non-slip or grip pads designed to keep rugs in place also can keep your bed skirt from moving. Cut a roughly 1-foot-square piece for each box spring corner and its center. Position the bed skirt as usual, and then the mattress. The added grip should end the slip. For reassurance or to tame a still-slipping skirt, place additional grip squares on the bed skirt, and re-position the mattress.

Often, a slipping bed skirt is a product of poor fabric pairing; its silky fabric simply slides around on a silky, slippery box spring as you move about on the mattress. An easy fix to this dilemma is to put a fitted flannel or cotton sheet on the box spring. The older and more textured the fabric, such as pilly sheets that you no longer use on your bed, the more friction or grip it has on the bed skirt.