My Sweet Little Dresses!

Back in May I entered a giveaway on The Long Thread (fun blog - check it out!), and I WON!  Lucky me!  I won a sweet little dress from leila and ben!  I'm finally ready to post about it since I FINALLY got it sent out to my niece.  Isn't it adorable?

Along with that, I got the sewing pattern for the dress so I could make an endless supply of my own!  I happen to know an adorable pair of sisters who I decided needed some matching sweet little dresses!  We were going to visit them a few months ago, and since the pattern is pretty basic and simple, and I already had the fabric I wanted to use on hand, I decided I could whip them both up the night before we left. Big Sister's dress was a breeze!

I got through it in a snap, no problem!  Also, I found a new useful tool in my box of grandma presents - my new "hem measurer"

I have no idea what this thing is actually called, or how you're actually supposed to use it, but I'm pretty sure it is for hems.  I used it for ironing under my raw edges like so:

Fold it up to the tab, iron it down - simple as that

All you real seamstresses are probably shaking your heads and unfollowing my blog right now.  Sorry guys!  I don't claim to have any actual training in this!

Also, I got to use some of my Grandma elastic on this one - I was shocked to find that it was in perfect stretchy condition!

Anyways, let's move on to Little Sister's dress.  I call it a disaster, only because it was late and I was crunched for time, in the light of day it probably wouldn't have upset me so much.  For clarification,  this disaster arose only by my own error - don't go blaming leila and ben, because their pattern is great!  This is just a "Jenny screwed something up" story.  

I had gotten through a significant amount of the sewing on Little Sister's dress and was trimming the seams as called for in the pattern and then, as I snipped the underarm corner, I cut through the seam.  I sat there for a good 5 minutes staring at it in disbelief.  Then I said a few bad words. Then I cried a few angry tears. Then I tried to fix it.  It got worse and worse the more I tried to fix it.  Then I looked at the other sleeve and saw that the seams were not lined up - AT ALL.  Ummm... how did that happen? The whole thing was totally jacked up. I said a few more bad words, and tried to fix it again, which didn't work, again.  I ended up throwing the whole thing in the trash. Poor Stephen didn't really know what to do that evening, because I was in such a bad mood.  Anyways, the next day only Big Sister got a dress the next day.

About a week later I finally got over my distress over the Little Sister dress, ripped out the jacked up sleeves, cut out new ones, and reattached them.  Came out super cute!! Then it hung on my closet door for about a month. But now it's all packed up and ready to send!  Something to look forward to Little Sister! (Of course, given my record of getting packages to the post office in a timely fashion, I might just hand deliver it next time we visit...)

Note how my one and only zinnia bloom is color coordinated - woohoo!

So, the moral of this story is, this is a great pattern, and I'm 100% sure anyone could do it.  But don't be a doofus like me - pay attention to what you're doing. (and thanks to leila and ben, and the long thread!)