A Couple of Sommer Dresses

Once Easter rolls around in our neck of the woods, we’re definitely ready for spring, even if the weather hasn’t quite caught up with our wishes.  A spring break trip to Florida was the perfect excuse to follow my heart and sew up a couple of decidedly spring/summer dresses.

I was pretty excited to cut into my brand new piece of Plockade in Summer from Sarah Jane’s new Sommer line.  This is a pretty cool line with lots of gorgeous prints on regular cotton as well and canvas and double gauze!  I’m for sure going to work my way through a couple more of these prints this summer — first up will be the same Plockade print, but in the navy colorway, as it has a completely different look.

One of the best things about this particular print is that it’s flowery and girly without being overly pinky-pink.  The pink flowers are actually more of a coral, making it a bit more sophisticated.  Don’t tell Kiki & Lulu.

The pattern is Dress A from Happy Homemade Sew Chic Kids.  I think I’ve sewn up about 75% of the patterns from this book by now, and they are always pretty perfect.

But I do have to be careful with the sizing, since these patterns tend to be on the wide side, as far as I’m concerned.  For the almost six year old Kiki, I cut a size 4 width with a size 6 length.  And for the almost 4 year old Lulu, I cut a straight up size 4 (as she’s wider than her sister for some reason).  Both dresses fit just right.

Yes, my girls are still into matching dresses.  I suggested different patterns and/or different fabrics, but they were having none of it.  So matching dresses it is.  Sometimes it seems like that’s the only thing they can agree on these days 🙂

Lulu was not at all excited about having her photo taken on this (particular day to say the least) — even with the promise of popsicles.  So I didn’t push the issue, and this is about the best I could do.  You’ll just have to use your imagination.

I found some very cute green transparent buttons in my stash that worked well on the back.

I tried a couple of different kinds of button loops — I thought about using narrow elastic and decided that was too fiddly.  Then, I tried out the button loop method outlined in the book, which led to disastrous results for me.  This method involves cutting a 1 3/4″ square, folding it in half on the bias, handstitching it 1/4″ from the fold, trimming and turning it out using the needle and thread still attached to the loop.  This took forever for me to figure out (you have to knot the thread at the end of the stitching before trying to turn it out — duh) and ended up with a way too short loop.  Ugh.  In the end, I went with the Oliver + S method — press a 1″ strip into doublefold bias tape and topstitch it closed, giving you a 1/4″ wide loop.  Easy.  It seems ridiculous that I spent so much time futzing around with something as silly as a button loop.  Ah well.

Both girls are happy with their dresses and can’t wait until it’s warm enough to actually wear them outside and run around barefoot.  The sad truth is that this is what’s happening in our backyard right now . . .

. . . and it doesn’t look like we’re even close to being able to wear summery dresses yet.  But the day will come.  And when it does, we’ll be ready!