Amy’s Dress: Easter Post #2

Just getting started! New fabrics have good smells and wonderful
possibilities!

If you have been reading the blog for a while, you know how much I revere my Grandma Miller. You can read the post about her here. She is the reason that I craft. I used to spend one or 2 weeks out of every summer — sometimes twice — at her house, sewing. Sometimes she\’d show me a different skill like knitting (which I did not get back then) or crocheting, but most of our time together was spent sewing. Grandma Miller made a lot of my clothes in grade school and most of the time, my Easter dresses. To her, this was as natural as breathing. Born in 1903, and the oldest of nine children in a Dakota farm family, she was expected to help her mother run the house, and that included cooking and sewing for everyone. And sew, she did. All the time. It was her identity. At 90 years old, she was still sewing clothing, and repairing and hemming things for everyone in her retirement community. Everyone trusted her to do a wonderful job — and she did. I want to grow up to be just like her.

I like to transfer my patterns to Pellon pattern tracing material,
in order to reuse them someday in other sizes.

While I have gravitated largely to knitting, I still sometimes sew. And, when I do, I love to sew apparel. I want to
become better at it — with fitting, for example — but for now, I have at least honored Grandma Miller\’s memory by making my girls Easter dresses almost every year. This year was no different, except that Annie was at her dad\’s this year, leaving Amy Rose and myself.

My own dress is not finished yet, but I am working on it!! Amy\’s dress, however, is complete. It had tricky parts, as all projects do, but overall I\’d say this pattern was pretty simple and straightforward.

Things I liked about this pattern include the

Pellon comes on bolts and can be purchased relatively inexpensively.
It also saves your pattern, just take a bit more time to execute. I trace
my patterns with a black ball point pen. Be sure to get all the markings down!

lining for the bodice, which encloses a lot of raw edges and helps the top lie flat and smooth. I also like how it leaves options open to change up the appearance of the dress, but this is also tricky, as it makes the pattern more complicated to read.

Overall, I\’d say most patterns do not have enough interior finishing for me. I hate the idea that as soon as you wash a new article of clothing, the inside seams fray, even if just a little. I realize the manufacturers are relying on the sewer to know how to finish as they\’d like, but I am sometimes lazy and I just want to be told what to do in the instructions! Last year, I did finish the inside of Amy\’s fancier Daisy Kingdom dress pattern as I went along, closing in all the seams with bias tape. And it does look really nice. Maybe I\’ll go back and do that this time, we\’ll see. Don\’t hold your breath.

The pockets and ties went on before sewing front to back. I like that in a design! Made it easier than it might have
otherwise been.

I used a helpful Youtube video on turning a tube inside out this time. You can find it here.
I used a knitting needle instead of a skewer as shown in the video,
and NO, do not use the pointy tip! Mine went through the fabric!!

Another reason to transfer your pattern to Pellon is that patterns are not available forever.
This one is no longer made. I found this out when I went to Joann\’s to get a smaller size, after
measuring Amy Rose and finding out that her chest is narrower than my pattern by 3 inches!
Since the pattern is out of print, I made the dress narrower by placing the front
and back sections off the fold of the fabric by 3/4 of an inch, making
the whole thing 3 inches smaller in total. Worked great!
(If there had been other necessary alterations, this would not have
been as easy!)