Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Big girl dress





Here's the dress I made my big girl for my brother's wedding recently. It's the Peekaboo Dress pattern by Bettsy Kingston. When my girl first saw a picture of the dress she loved it, I think mainly because of the way the petticoat underskirt makes it flare out. At first I bought a beautiful (and expensive) cotton print fabric featuring little owls and branches. But I think she (I!) was after something a little more dressy and special. It's not everyday a girl gets to dress up! So the cotton has been put in the stash for another day...



So we next bought a fabric with a little more of a party feel. The dress is a simple high waisted style, fully lined, with a full skirt. With or without the petticoat it has a lovely drape and makes a girl want to twirl and twirl, apparently (rather than stand still for your mum to photograph you in it)!





I thought the dress needed some decoration so I made this huge flower to sit on the side of her waist. Through making a couple of other flowers I worked out a simple method of gathering strips of fabric and sewing them onto a circle. I used a few different fabrics to give it texture and link the dress and petticoat visually. In my typical fashion I finished this about an hour before she needed to wear it - pretty stressful and silly of me, but as I'd squeezed other projects into every other available time slot that's all that was left!



I made a separate petticoat to go underneath (the pattern has instructions for an attached or detached petticoat). It was fun to make but the instructions lost me a bit (must have needed an extra coffee that day!) so I just did what I thought would work. It's not as poufy as the pic on the pattern but still did the job, thought maybe I should have attached it to the dress because my girl kept talking it off and putting it back on during the reception.



And as the evening wore on the petticoat became a lion's mane. Roarrr!!!


4 comments:

  1. That is utterly gorgeous. And hilarious.

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  2. A beautiful little dress and lions mane.. ha ha ha

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  3. That is an adorable dress, I'm very envious of both the beautiful flower and the perfect petticoat which I'm now declaring the new pettiskirt. Maximum impact!

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  4. Good scan, good points, a number of which I have learned along the manner additionally (humility, grace, layoff the controversial stuff). Can share with my colleagues at work as we begin blogging from a company perspective.

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