Monday, April 26, 2010

Rainbow Party Project #4: The Rainbow Party Dress

You might think that a party wouldn't necessarily call for a brand-new, handmade, thematically appropriate dress.

You'd be wrong. Seriously, you're talking to the woman who made the children matching outfits for Music Day, and they didn't even perform!

It just so happens that I happened to have in my stash (and I have it because the children begged for it who knows how long ago when we were at Joann's, and it was cheap and also on sale) three yards of sickeningly pink, sickeningly rainbow and hearts flannel fabric. I don't sew with flannel so much anymore, so I have been busy turning all my novelty flannel prints into colored pencil rolls, but pink? And rainbows? It was meant to be.

Here's what it was meant to be:
It was meant to be hers.

The dress is sewn from a vintage children's pattern, the same one that I used to sew Willow's crochet dress--both those dresses are a size 3, incidentally, but you can tell that the crochet material has WAAAAY more stretch. This one is a perfect fit for my almost-four-year-old, in length and width, and it has a terrific fit to it, too, I think, which you don't always find in children's clothing:
The entire dress is trimmed in purple flannel bias--
--and the closures are done in mismatched (but matching) buttons, the buttonholes of which it took TWO sewing machines, and a lot of swears, to sew:
I'd say that the baby looks like an angel in her sweet new dress, but I don't know...
She's the kind of kid who can look awfully naughty just sitting on the couch, you know what I mean?

P.S. Check out my tutorial for back-to-front blanket binding over at Crafting a Green World. Ooh, and in my post about Waldorf dolls, the public is amusingly already up in arms that I so much as mentioned Waldorf's foundation in anthroposophy. It is what it is, people.

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