final post for this kid’s clothes week challenge – a butterfly dress!

i love wearing blue. my eyes are blue and when i wear it, they look even bluer. my daughter’s are blue too and it looks wonderful on her, but she calls it a “boy color” and wants nothing to do with it. to persuade her, i need to give the garment a “special feature” that she’ll love, like ruffles or butterflies or a major twirly skirt…or all three at once!

this is the coraline dress, a tutorial by jess of craftiness is not optional. jess is kind of the queen of sewing tutorials (check them all out here) and i realized that aside from her junebug dress which i remixed, i haven’t really made one even though i wanted to! when i saw this pop up, i knew it was time.

probably not the greatest choice for my final project of KCWC, after sewing more than just one hour a day all week (and blogging too!), to pick a pretty involved, bias bound/ruffle/buttonhole/full gathered skirt dress, but jess and i have some fun news coming up this week, so i wanted to end with one of her tutorials.  and oh yes, it was a very solid tutorial. no head scratching moments, though i always struggle with the sandwich-and-sew method of bias binding and have to finish sections of the inside by hand. no worries – an easy fix.

i used rae’s flashback skinny tee as the bodice base (word to the wise – size up if you do this! i’m pretty bummed that this just barely fits over her head now, so she’d better stop growing so she can wear it for more than a couple weeks!). i trimmed the tops of the shoulders and wrapped the bias around to the wrong side of the armholes rather than having it show.

one benefit of having a ridiculously messy sewing room is that some of the dark gray shot cotton that i used in her elephant charlie dress was still laying around on my cutting table. when i saw how nicely it paired with the lizzy house butterfly sky fabric, i decided to work it in on the placket and added some flat piping, too.

as has happened a few times before, Em saw the dress in process and protested “but i want pink!” and then when she saw the actual dress finished, she giggled in glee. she’s a good sport. i think i’d better make her a pink dress next, or she may stage a revolt. though as long as she can twirl, run, and ride her strider bike in a dress (with the skirt tucked into her underwear), she’s pretty happy. in fact, she moved so much during our photoshoot, i didn’t get a straight on shot of the dress! i didn’t realize this until she had changed into her (pink) swimsuit for some sprinkler-running, so i had to use the old hang-the-dress-in-the-lilac-bush technique.

that’s it for me! five items sewn in six days (took a break on friday). the energy around this KCWC was fantastic, it has been so fun watching everyone make such amazing stuff. really great job, ladies, and thanks again for hosting, meg!

i sewed this on day 3 of KCWC. it is now day 5, and this evening was the first chance i had to get a photo of her wearing it! oy. my day job is interfering with my photoshoots!

if you’ve been hanging around my blog for any length of time, you’re probably well aware of my almost-four-year-old’s love of elephants. it started when a good friend (YO E!!!) painted some sweet elephant art for her nursery and gifted her a stuffed elephant as a tiny baby. at a certain point, Em adopted elephants as her sort of mascot. in fact, i’m considering an elephant theme for her birthday party next week…nope, haven’t planned it yet.

anyway, so when we hit the bolt sale one recent weekend and Em spotted this elephant print (ellie fam by birch organics), there was really no choice but to buy it. together we picked the PERFECT kaffe fassett shot cotton to pair with it (steel – the crossweave is orange!) and she immediately started asking me when it’d be done…

i originally planned to make the new oliver + s croquet dress with this combo, but it seemed a little too involved for my KCWC goals, and besides, Rae went and released her charlie dress add-on which i’ve been wanting to sew forever! i decided the fabrics were more suited to the charlie dress instead. like so many of Rae’s patterns, i had swooned over the many tester versions she posted about in recent months, waiting for the official release. that girl is a GOOD pattern maker, seriously. you never know when you download something from “a blogger” whether it’ll actually work out, and hers are high quality and clear. i trust her completely. i’d never made a yoke like this, and her instructions made it a snap.

ETA: i’ve been seeing a lot about sharing struggles this week, so i did want to mention one thing – the sleeve facings were hard to get a clean topstitching line on, since they’re a couple inches up the sleeve and i wanted to sew on the right side rather than “in the tube” like usual.  i got it, but on a 3T it was hard not to sew multiple layers by mistake.  i think next time i would attach the sleeve facings first and THEN sew the side and arm seams, and add topstitching to the edge of the sleeves to tack down the seam allowances.  anyway, not a mistake in the pattern, just maybe an easier way to do it in the future?

Rae’s clothing designs have unique and exaggerated shapes that i love, and Em still gets so much use out of her pierrot tops (one and two) that i could just keep making those and be set. but i get a total kick out of this dresshiki and think it’s great that the charlie can make a darn cute boy shirt, too.

so yeah, it was fun for day 3 to try another new pattern, experiment with colors combos i’ve never sewn (orange isn’t my fave, sorry to say…but i do like making something other than pink!), and give my little gal something she had a hand in designing.

it has sparkly buttons, but she wouldn’t hold still enough for a photo of them. that’s a good sign.