The thoughts, sewing projects, and fabric oglings of a dedicated sewist.

Birthday Twirls

8/22/13
If you've been following this blog for a while you know that I do very little sewing for my own girls.  They have tons of clothes (handmedowns and grandma gifts) so they don't really need anything, and I prefer to build up my own wardrobe during my personal sewing time.  But I do make a birthday dress for each of them and the non-birthday girl gets a skirt from the leftover fabric.

Belly's birthday is today but I had to get her dress ready for the family birthday party that took place over the weekend.  Belly has a light yellow eyelet dress that was a hand-me-down from someone.  She decided she wanted a pink version of the dress for her birthday this year.  The original dress has princess seams, empire waist, ribbon sash and full gathered skirt. 

Inspiration dress

In drafting the pattern using the pin through method, I skipped the princess seams since their only role was to hold the ribbon sash and Belly didn't want to have to tie anything.  I also decided to make the skirt a circle skirt because my girls are currently in love with twirling.  And there's nothing like twirling in a circle skirt, right?

We couldn't find any suitable pink eyelet fabric, so Belly helped me dye the fabric early last week.  I used RIT fuchsia dye because I hadn't gotten around to ordering fiber reactive dye in time.  She had a lot of fun watching the fabric turn from white to pink.

Sorry for the blurriness - I took the photo while it was still steaming

From this point onwards I wanted to use what was in my stash which led to a bit of a hodge podge construction process.  We decided to line the dress in dark gray cotton lawn except that I didn't have enough of the dark gray so we used light gray for the skirt lining.  I wanted to add piping at the neck, arms, and waist, but I didn't have enough 1/8" cording so I used 1/4" cording for the waist.  Belly had chosen decorative purple flower buttons but I misplaced those in my sewing room (ack!) but she settled for these slightly different purple flower buttons.  And, Watch out! Here she comes!





Check out the twirl!

I did a variety of rolled hems for the skirt: a serged rolled hem on the lining (since it was short enough already) and a regular rolled hem on the eyelet.  It was a little tough sewing the thin hem on the embroidered bits, but no one will notice the bumps on this.  Cora wanted to help with this but she got fed up about half-way through the first pass on the hem ("This is hard, Mama." Sigh.)!



I also made fancy cupcakes for the party and Cora chose popstar microphone cupcakes from the crazy cupcake book:




And today my big girl is 6! 

3 comments on "Birthday Twirls"
  1. She looks so cute in the fuschia dress :) Happy Birthday to her

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh she is so cute! What a beautiful dress! I'm really impressed that you're letting her jump around in it - if I'd spent that much time and effort making a dress, I'd want her to sit still, LOL! Hope she has a fantastic birthday!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cute! I love the fuschia and gray combination. And love those superstar cupcakes!!

    ReplyDelete