Process

I've been wanting to take before and after pictures of my dresses for a while. The problem is that I often don't know what I'm going to do ahead of time... so I have a hard time taking the before photo. Today I decided that I would at least start with a before photo of the shirts that I thought I might use. It worked out. I used the two that I took the picture of... plus a few things from my scrap bin.

The clover pajamas were inherited from a friend of mine. It was at the end of her garage sale and she was packing things up to be donated. I loved the pattern and thought it would be cute on a dress. The pieces were small, so it involved a lot of cutting.


I played with putting the clover fabric on the sleeves... but it was a little too much. So I used it for the ruffle instead. I had to piece several strips together and ended up using the entire pajama top to make it a nice full ruffle. I have zig-zagged the edges to make it a little lacy on the bottom of the ruffle.


Because the bottom of the shirt was just as busy as the top, I opted for white sleeves (pulled from my scrap box). I added a green flower on the bottom made from about 10 small hearts.

After lots of indecision, cutting, and sewing... this dress ultimately took me just under two hours. Which, is about average for a dress. I spent a lot of time debating on covering the "s" in "charms" - I thought it would be cute if it said "Lucky Charm". However, the placement of the "s" made things look a little awekard there and I'm not sure it would have translated correctly once it was on a child. It's a size 3T and will probably be listed in the store some time this week.