First Dress Ever

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but before last week, I had never sewn a dress before, let alone from a pattern. So some may wonder, "Jessie, why did you agree to make a dress for another person for money?" Well... I'd made skirts from patterns before. And boxer shorts. I know how patterns work (frustratingly, sometimes). And there are instructions, so how bad could it be?

Well, the truth is, not that bad. It took me just over 11 hours to make a dress, bonnet, and pinafore for a young Prairie Girl Halloween costume. Not too shabby, really.

There was only one real snafu, but it was easily remedied. I ignored the instructions on how to cut out some of the pieces for the dress, thinking, "That's really complicated, and I have plenty of fabric left!" I forgot that I still needed to cut out the pieces for the bonnet out of the same fabric. So I didn't have enough fabric for the bonnet ties. So I substituted some ribbon I had, which I think is cuter anyway. :-)

Photos!




Oh yeah, and I'd never made a button hole before either. It's amazingly easy to do on my beautiful Bernina 830.


Bonnet (modeled by my broken clothesline).


That's the bottom of the bonnet -- it has a bow on the back, and you can see the makeshift ribbon ties.

There's no photo of the pinafore because I made the whole thing in one 3 hour stretch late Saturday night. It's a lovely shade of light blue.

Then I had a dream about pinning fabric in my sleeping. It was weird.

So there you have it. On the job training -- the best kind!