Cherry print girl’s dress

There’s nothing quite like a deadline to boost productivity, is there?  That is how this dress came about – a last-minute desire to sew something for my daughter to wear for her nursery photo.

This is her ‘model pose’, with hands on hips!

You may recognise this fabric from my first Anna dress.  There was never enough of this to make a whole garment, so this dress really is a miracle considering I’d used up most of the fabric already.  I had to heavily adapt the pattern in order to make this work!

Front view – although covered by cardigan here!

First up, I omitted the lining.  This meant I had to finish the armholes and neckline with bias tape.  I didn’t have much fabric to play with, so I cut diagonal strips from various scraps and sewed them all together.  This means my bias tape has seams about every 10cm, but at least it matches!

Front view, without cardigan, but mid-run!

I also changed the skirt pattern completely.  I used the biggest rectangle I could for two skirt backs and then cut a skirt front from what was leftover.  They weren’t anywhere near the same width which meant I would have to have a centre front skirt ‘panel’ and then the skirt backs would have to wrap around the sides to meet this front panel.  Either the skirt front or the backs were cut on the cross grain, I can’t remember which now.  I also had to include the selvedge as hem allowance!!

Selvedges in the hem allowance!

Anyway, with a little ingenuity and inventiveness with fabric scraps, I got it all to come together and made a wearable dress!  Yay!  The do say necessity is the mother of invention, do they not?!

Back view

And in homage to The Amazing Tara Cat, here are some photos of Little Tweedie wearing her new dress whilst dancing…

Dancing…

…and giggling!