FO Friday: Dress Number 2

If you've been following my blog you will probably have guessed that I've had an assignment due and so haven't had the time to fit a blog post in. You'll probably also remember that I had finished making Erin a dress in my last post. I let her have it before her actual birthday because she had a school disco a couple of weeks before it, so she was able to wear the dress to that and her birthday party.

Erin at her karaoke party in her new dress

I then set about making Orla's dress. It too is a Cloth Kits dress. Now Erin isn't big, in fact she's probably the smallest in her class and there wasn't loads of growing room in the dress above so I had a bit of a dilemma with Orla's dress. I could cut out 3-4 or 5-6. She'll be 4 in August and is also small but I decided to cut out the bigger size. My main reason for this was the small fitting of Erin's dress and the style of Orla's. It's pulled in by buttons at the back and I figured I could adjust the placement of the button and/or add another buttonhole if needed or I could just adjust the dress. After all, you can always make something smaller.

The next problem I had was that the seam allowance on the dress meant that you could see the cutting lines for the smaller size along part of the neckline at the front. (For those not familiar with Cloth Kits, the pattern is printed onto the fabric so you cut out the pieces directly, there's no paper pattern to pin on). I really didn't like this at all so I ended up adjusting the seam allowance to hide it. I realised later that you can still see some cutting lines down the side seam of the dress and it annoys me but it's a lot of work to hide them because any adjustment would have to be made in a way that keeps the shape of the dress so I decided just to leave it.

Here it is. The picture above is when I was pinning the straps in place to figure out where the buttons needed to go and they've now been sewn on. Orla is really pleased with it.