Orange Flower Girl Dress

My brother got married last month and he and his now wife wanted to have their three nieces in orange. My three year old and my new sister in law's three year old niece had matching dresses and my challenge was to make something that coordinated -without seeing in person the other two dresses. This is a picture of the dress online.  My best bet around here was to find something at JoAnn's which can be pretty limiting. I found the only fabric that I thought would fit the bill. It was close enough. In fact, one of my sister in laws had offered to make ties and bowties for all of the nephews and she used this exact same fabric. It is a costume satin. I am glad that it worked out for the wedding, but it does not hold up very well. I had to wash it after the wedding and the dress now has a lot of nice little snags in it. I used my favorite little girl dress pattern for this. Simplicity 2767. I bought matching tulle to put on the outside of the skirt to match the others but decided that I didn't like the way it looked with this dress and because I knew that there was a good chance that the tulle would get ripped to shreds. I was right on that account. After the wedding Bella's dress had a hole in her tulle and I will now have to trim it or cut it off completely if she wants to wear it again.

Because I don't really care for the flowers in the pattern I wanted to try something different on this dress. I have been wanting to make some burned edge flowers for a long long time and this seemed like the perfect chance. One of my cousins recently directed me to this wonderful tutorial so I used that for guidance. It was so fun I ended up making a bazillion of these. I made a few for hair accessories for the girls and one for myself and several others I had intended on sharing with any of the girls in the wedding party that were interested, but it turns out my new SIL has a very talented sister who made cute flowery hairbands for all the girls. So I now have a lot of these laying around my house. Some on brooch pins like this one. And some on hair clips, headbands and bobby pins.  I'm not sure what I am going to do with them so maybe they will end up as gifts. I found some pink and yellow satins in the remnant bin the other day so i am excited to make some in those colors as well.

XO

Maren

Shirred Dress

This dress was made from the Zinna pattern from Kustom Kids Boutique which has now closed their doors. I like the dress but once again I am not a big fan of the fabrics I put together. I love the main fabric but I don't love how it looks with the blue here. Oh well. And I have to find some better elastic thread and redo some of the sewing on this dress because some of the elastic has already broken because I used some cheap-on-a-plastic-spool-kind of elastic thread. Don't make that mistake. If you are going to shirr, make sure you get the right kind of thread. See LeAnne's tutorial on shirring. She even has a great picture of the RIGHT kind of elastic thread. I also did another dress from the Kiera pattern also from Kustom Kids Boutique. It is basically the same thing except instead of a ruffle it has a contrasting band across the bottom and no tie. It turned out a lot cuter than this one, but I haven't taken a picture of it yet. I also have to redo some of the stitching on that one.  Shirring seiriously is ridiculously easy. You can pretty much make a dress like this in one afternoon. Check out LeAnne's Sweet Summer Dress Tutorial for a simple shirred dress, easy to change up however you like.

XO

Maren