1. Find a pattern that appeals to you (luckily for the designer I could see past the awful fabric choices on the model.)
2. Measure squirmy toddler, decide on size.
3. Cut pieces.
4. Spend hours pinning, sewing, pressing and topstitching.
5. Try dress on toddler and realize…you have a very skinny toddler. And the dress? The dress is not skinny. In fact, the dress has a whopping 8″ of ease around the toddler’s skinny little ribcage.
6. Have sinking feeling in pit of stomach after realizing that 8″ of ease in a dress that’s only 28″ in circumference is, well, ridiculous.
7. Dissolve into tears when your mother concurs that, really, the dress looks a lot more like pajamas than a dress.
8. Spend hours with your mother picking out (double-stitched!) seams, fudging new armhole openings, cutting pieces off of the dress that was completely finished, and stitching it all back together.
9. Press the thing, put it on a hanger and wait until morning.
10. Try it on the toddler who never stands still and do a little happy dance since it actually looks like a dress instead of a flour sack now.
So here’s the dress. Technically it’s not completely finished, as I can’t get Carrie to stand still enough for the split second it would take to figure out where to hem the sleeves. I’m going to have to baste them where I think they should fall and try it on her again.
Also, there’s a pinafore that goes over top of this thing (added bonus: I can probably find a nice shirt to go under the pinafore and have another variation for some of the holiday things we’ll be doing next month). This is the bodice before I’ve figured out how to cut it down to the right size, since I don’t want to have to alter it after I’ve sewn the whole thing this time. It’s a very fine wale stretch corduroy that is not quite as bright as the picture shows.
