Something new

So, I decided it would be fun to make a dress for the baby girl for my friend’s upcoming wedding.  I figured if it didn’t work out, I still had a couple of nice dresses that would serve as back up.  Originally, I wanted to make the oliver+s bubble dress, the same dress I made for the baby girl’s first birthday.  I saw a number of bubble dresses in silk dupioni on flickr, and they were just beautiful and perfect for a wedding.  But I ended up changing my mind, because I had been thinking I wanted to try a pattern I had not made before, and then I saw this dress pattern.  I imagined it would be lovely in silk.

This is the first time I’ve sewn with silk.  For the most part, it wasn’t too hard.  The fabric didn’t slip and slide or anything crazy.  But I had ordered the fabric from fabric.com, and when it came, it had been folded, and I didn’t realize how hard it would be to get those fold lines out.  I tried ironing, squirting some steam on it, squirting some water on it, steaming it in the shower.  Those fabric lines were stubborn.  You can still see them in this picture here:

(I was going to wait until I had a good picture to blog about this dress, but it is currently en route to the dry cleaners, and who knows when I’ll get around to taking another picture of it.  So, camera phone picture, it is.)

The hubs said he couldn’t even tell, but I can see them.  When she's wearing it, you can hardly tell, though.  So, I was fine with it.  And I was really happy with how the dress came out.

I made the little guy a matching tie from the Lil Boo Blue pattern.

They are such hams:

The dress pattern itself was great!  Really easy to follow.  Amazingly cute for how simple it was to make.  The only problem I had was with the “magical hemming technique” in the instructions.  I ended up completely twisting the whole thing, so I had to pick out the seams very carefully, because the fabric is so delicate.  I just ironed in the hems and edge stitched.  I think this resulted in the same look.  I might try the “magical hemming technique” again one of these days, with something more sturdy like cotton.

The other problem with silk was the fabric was so delicate, I was afraid of messing something up or ruining it beyond repair, but I managed to keep it together.  The edges also frayed like crazy.  Just in the couple of weeks that I stored the fabric in the drawer, there was a mess of threads from the fabric that had frayed.  I cut each pattern piece as I went along (a tip from someone on the o+s forums) but even so, by the time I got to hemming the dress, I had to trim off about an inch of fraying.  I think it took off a little bit of length, but it doesn't look too short, I don't think.

 

I discovered that these kids love to dance.  They burned up the dance floor.  Too funny.