Sewn with Love dress

Given that we've been rather snowed in the last few days, I had some time to make up a project from one of my sewing books. The sailor has been taking the subaru to work, since Jersey City has yet to see fit to plow our street yet (Seriously! Snow is still knee deep out there!) which leaves me at home with the choices of (a) walk places through uncleared sidewalks, (b) risk some highly non-functional public transportation options or (c) stay home and sew. What would you do? ;)

I've just about completed a dress from the Sewn With Love book, it's just lacking buttons and buttonholes. This dress had some really cute details like a back button band, but I had a few frustrations with it as well. First, they blithely tell you to gather and insert the fashion fabric skirt + a tulle skirt + the lining skirt, all of which have many many many many gathers, in one go. Um... yeah. I ended up zigzagging the tulle to the lining skirt (I wanted the scratchy tulle edging to be hidden away from sensitive kid skin, anyway). Then I stitched down some stay tape on the bodice and inserted the skirt and lining.



In addition, all the patterns are on CD so you have to print pages and tape them together. Which would be OK, but they make you do that for the fashion fabric skirt pattern piece, and another pattern piece for the lining skirt. Which, again, would be OK if they also just listed the dimensions somewhere for those of us who would rather cut two rectangles to size using rulers than tape together 35 sheets of paper just to cut out two different sized rectangles.



In all, it's kind of a cute dress in the end. The fabric is a cotton lawn from Mood which I bought a few months ago with the idea of a full skirted party dress for Kate. And you can see I sneaked in a decorative stitch at the bottom of the skirt lining!

And here's a little Christmas photo catch-up of three projects that I never took pictures of earlier. First up, a flannel nightgown that I made for my mom... she asked for a v-neckline, so I tweaked the yoke and finished the neck edge with a bias strip, otherwise it's the same ancient Butterick pattern that I always use.





A little quilted table runner I made for our tiny table


And some Christmas pillows for the bed :-)


Very comfy to lean against as I relax, do nothing, and watch the gorgeous sunsets we've been having!



Happy new years!