Tag Archives: toddler dress

My Signature Look: Easter Dresses 2012

I can’t believe it! This is our last week for this season’s Project Run & Play. As with each season, the final challenge is our signature look.

I have thought about what might define my children’s clothing style and this is what I came up with:

I like little girls to look like little girls. Luckily right now mine are very little, but even for older ones I just think children should dress like children. There is plenty of time in life for dressing like a grown-up.

I prefer classic styles for girls. Sixties, Fifties, Forties, Thirties, Victorian, etc. I love the silhouettes, the details and the girliness of it all. Ruffles, pleats, embroidery, sashes and bows. So much goodness there. I don’t like to use a ton of embellishment…only enough to add just the right touch.

I tend to like solid color fabrics and subtle or graphic prints (nothing too busy). And, if I do use a print, I like the fabric to be the main feature of the dress.

When the challenge list was announced Christian pointed out that the Easter dresses I had just made fit exactly as my signature look.

The fabric is a pinstriped Swiss dot with green and yellow on a white field. (I cannot remember for the life of me where I got it, but I know I got it online somewhere.) I just loved this fabric. It is really light and I love the tiny dots and pinstripes.

I wanted to showcase the fabric so I chose a very traditional, simple pattern. Esther’s dress is McCalls M5791 and Dinah’s is a sized-up, self-drafted version of that.

I tweaked the pattern a bit by adding a yellow band to the bottom of the lining on Esther’s dress and making extra-wide sashes for both girls.

The design isn’t going to set the world on fire, but I just love the simplicity and lightness and they were perfect for our Florida Easter.

…
Fun story about these dresses: Esther’s dress is actually the dress I cut out for Dinah to wear to my sister’s wedding in April 2010. Two years ago. With the quilt I was finishing up for my sister and all the other wedding preparations I didn’t get to finish it. And by the time I recovered Dinah had outgrown it. So, all the little cut pieces sat in a box for two years until I pulled them out to make Esther’s Easter dress this year. When I pulled it out I realized that I had a TON of that fabric leftover…enough to make a dress for Dinah too. Yay for over-purchasing!

Baby, Take a Bow!

This week’s challenge for Project Run & Play was Let’s Go to the Movies! We were to be inspired by something or someone in the movies. Awhile back my dad noticed the similarity between my Dinah and Shirley Temple, so when this challenge was announced I just knew that I had to make her a Shirley Temple Dress.

I started by doing some research and found lots of great images of Shirley Temple and I just love the style of 1930s girls’ clothes.

Source: google.com via Harmony on Pinterest

Source: fanpop.com via Harmony on Pinterest

My original thought was to do something like this:

Source: google.com via Harmony on Pinterest

But I couldn’t find fabric like this anywhere and decided it wasn’t very practical. So I settled on something like this, from the movie “Baby, Take a Bow”:

Source: google.com via Harmony on Pinterest

Joann actually had a cotton in this sweet tiny dot that was perfect. And I found a pattern with all these knife pleats and huge puffy sleeves that was almost perfect.

I modified the pattern in a couple ways. One, I wanted the buttons in the back and two, I didn’t like the button placket. So, I just used the same pattern piece for the front and the back and simply lowered the neckline for the front piece. For all the pleating detail the dress was actually very easy to make. It was just fairly time-consuming with all the hand-sewing it required.

I finished the outfit off with an eyelet trimmed slip,

a pair of bloomers and…

…lots of pin curls!

We had a fun photo shoot this morning. We went to an amphitheater nearby and let her play on the stage. She had a blast singing and twirling and skipping about.

Next week is our final challenge…our signature look. Honestly, I feel like this IS my signature look, but I do have something else great to show you next week.

For now, I have to go. I’ve got two Minnie Mouse dresses to create for our Disney trip this weekend. (!)

Grape Soda Dresses

This week’s Project Run & Play challenge was all about color. We were tasked to pick a color and design something around that color. Sound vauge and nebulous? You betcha! At first I was stumped and then I started looking through my stash and I found a bunch of purple fabric I had purchased for another project. I had four different complimentary shades of purple and I was immediately inspired.

Looking at the colors together in “order” reminded me of a freshly poured glass of grape soda. So, that is the effect I was going for here. A fresh, fizzy grape soda…perfect for summer.

I toyed with a couple different silhouettes before settling on this one in the sketch below.

Here are a few details about the dresses:

The top is a bodice pattern that I drafted up myself. Jess over at Craftiness is Not Optional has several great tutorials on how to do this easily. I drew a square neckline and cut off the bodice about an inch and a half under the armhole.

I made a little peek-a-boo opening at the back of the bodice. The dresses close at the top with a button and a ribbon loop.

The skirt of the dresses are tiered ruffles. I used the tutorial over at MADE for the Layered Skirt. (I love her stuff, in case you haven’t noticed.) I love how float-y the dresses look with all those ruffles.

For the hems I simply serged a rolled hem with some woolly nylon in the upper looper. I love the clean edge each of the ruffles have. The white tips also helped to lighten up some of the darker layers of purple.

And of course I had to make them hair accessories. They each got little rolled rose hair clippies made from the dress scraps.

My original idea for our photo shoot was to go to a little ice cream shop or something. However, I ran out of time and I was not going to try to do a location shoot by myself. So, the backyard it was. Unfortunately, three minutes after we got outside our lawn guy showed up. Back inside we went to wait it out. By the time we got outside again everyone was stir crazy. It was impossible to get a picture of them standing still!

Running, running, running!

Luckily for me the dresses looked great while they were running.

And now she is worn out from all that running.

_____

Next week is movie inspiration week. I am so excited about this next challenge! I am basing the outfit for my curly top on the style of the original Curly Top: Shirley Temple. I’ve got an awesome vintage dress planned.

Source: heckfridays.blogspot.com via Harmony on Pinterest

Esther’s Sportswear

I finished Esther’s version of the children’s sportswear last week and the girls wore their new outfits to our church’s Spring Jamboree this weekend. Here are a couple pictures of Esther at the event.

Her dress was made the same way as Dinah’s tunic, except I just did a faux button placket with ruffles. I thought full ruffles down the front would be overpowering on her small frame. I also added bias trim along the hem. I forgot to get pictures of the bloomers, but I made them out of the navy blue fabric and used the orange to do bias tape around the legs. I used Dana’s Perfect Diaper Cover pattern, but I made it MUCH bigger so there would be some volume to the bloomers. (Sidenote: These outfits really helped me conquer my bias tape fears. My next “stretch my sewing skills” challenge is piping.)

Look at her cast! Poor baby! She broke the growth plate in her wrist a couple weeks ago. She’s been a trooper though and we get the cast off on Friday this week. Yay!

Look at that Bear! She loves to be a model for me.

I also made little ponytail holders for both girls. I used (of course) fabric covered buttons and looped ponytail holders through the button loops. They were really easy and were the perfect accessory for their outfits.

_____

Oh, and in case you were wondering…last week’s challenge for Project Run and Play was an Earth Day challenge. We were supposed to:

Design an earth friendly children’s outfit.

You can do this by upcycling, using organic materials, or recycled materials.

Since I had a couple more involved outfits in mind for Weeks 4 and 5 I decided to enter my Upcycled Nightgowns from a few weeks ago.

The Wendy Dress

I promised details on the Wendy Dress in the Peter Pan Party post and here they are!

Because I tend to be a stickler for details I wanted Dinah’s Wendy Dress to be as accurate as possible.

Source: speakin-colors.blogspot.com via Harmony on Pinterest

Some elements it needed to have:

Boat neck
Empire Waist
Puff-bottom sleeves
Flowing skirt
Large blue hair bow

This dress ended up being a Frankenstein with pattern parts coming from many different sources…

I based the bodice on the Winter Rose Dress from iCandy Handmade. I sized it for Dinah and then chopped it off to make it empire waisted.

I drafted a sleeve block for Dinah and then adapted it to make the puff-bottom sleeves. I used the tutorials found on ikatbag. Such a great resource!

For the skirt, I didn’t want there to be a lot of bunchy gathering at the top, but I did want the skirt to have a ton of movement at the hem. A circle skirt was the perfect solution. I used the MADE circle skirt tutorial to make a pattern last fall for Dinah’s Goldilocks skirt. I pulled it out and added length to the hem.

To adapt the skirt to a dress, I simply cut a line from the hem to the waist. I stretched the waist out to match up with the waist on the bodice, pinned and stitched them together. After that I inserted the invisible zipper and stitched up the seam.

I didn’t want to lose any length at the hem, so I used my handy-dandy rolled hem foot. I purchased this foot separately when I purchased my machine. There was a learning curve to it, but I was able to figure it out and I was happy with the result. It isn’t perfect, but since this was just for a play costume I was okay with how it turned out.