KCWC spring 2012: days 6 & 7:: butterfly dress

final post for this kid’s clothes week challenge – a butterfly dress!

i love wearing blue. my eyes are blue and when i wear it, they look even bluer. my daughter’s are blue too and it looks wonderful on her, but she calls it a “boy color” and wants nothing to do with it. to persuade her, i need to give the garment a “special feature” that she’ll love, like ruffles or butterflies or a major twirly skirt…or all three at once!

this is the coraline dress, a tutorial by jess of craftiness is not optional. jess is kind of the queen of sewing tutorials (check them all out here) and i realized that aside from her junebug dress which i remixed, i haven’t really made one even though i wanted to! when i saw this pop up, i knew it was time.

probably not the greatest choice for my final project of KCWC, after sewing more than just one hour a day all week (and blogging too!), to pick a pretty involved, bias bound/ruffle/buttonhole/full gathered skirt dress, but jess and i have some fun news coming up this week, so i wanted to end with one of her tutorials.  and oh yes, it was a very solid tutorial. no head scratching moments, though i always struggle with the sandwich-and-sew method of bias binding and have to finish sections of the inside by hand. no worries – an easy fix.

i used rae’s flashback skinny tee as the bodice base (word to the wise – size up if you do this! i’m pretty bummed that this just barely fits over her head now, so she’d better stop growing so she can wear it for more than a couple weeks!). i trimmed the tops of the shoulders and wrapped the bias around to the wrong side of the armholes rather than having it show.

one benefit of having a ridiculously messy sewing room is that some of the dark gray shot cotton that i used in her elephant charlie dress was still laying around on my cutting table. when i saw how nicely it paired with the lizzy house butterfly sky fabric, i decided to work it in on the placket and added some flat piping, too.

as has happened a few times before, Em saw the dress in process and protested “but i want pink!” and then when she saw the actual dress finished, she giggled in glee. she’s a good sport. i think i’d better make her a pink dress next, or she may stage a revolt. though as long as she can twirl, run, and ride her strider bike in a dress (with the skirt tucked into her underwear), she’s pretty happy. in fact, she moved so much during our photoshoot, i didn’t get a straight on shot of the dress! i didn’t realize this until she had changed into her (pink) swimsuit for some sprinkler-running, so i had to use the old hang-the-dress-in-the-lilac-bush technique.

that’s it for me! five items sewn in six days (took a break on friday). the energy around this KCWC was fantastic, it has been so fun watching everyone make such amazing stuff. really great job, ladies, and thanks again for hosting, meg!