Mommy and Me !

Well folks, no, I don't have children but for the fashion show, a good teacher friend of mine has agreed to walk for me with her 8 year old daughter.  Since I have a lot of things to do, I chose to give my friend a very colourful dress I made from a pattern (Linda's best dress and top from the marvelous Linda McPhee (whom I am going to meet at the Creativ Festival in Toronto at the end of the month *squeals* !).  So it is a pieced number with, what else,  T-shirts !!!  So I thought it would be fun to make a mini version of it.  I asked my friend for a dress that fits her daughter and drafted the pattern very roughly from it.  On the paper, I traced some lines, reminiscent of my adult dress.  I still had the pile of t-shirts from my last disaster creation so I mimicked the colours with what I had.  However, I don't particularly like "bat-like" sleeves so I made some sleeves.  And a tip for saving time (and why I LOVE to work with already existing garments): put your sleeve pattern on an existing sleeve to get the HEM !!!  Since the top part is very tiny on a girl's dress, I decided not to cut the back into 2 pieces (like the adult version).

So, without further adieu, here are the dresses:

Front version - Doesn't it look like a smaller photocopy ;) ?

Back version.  Obviously, a bit different because of the pattern design...  

Can you spot my error on this side ?... (*palm to forehead*)

If I had more time, I would put some kind of embroidery or designs on certain pieces to spruce it up a bit.  I might print some things with potato stamps or something before the fashion show but we'll see.

- It is a bit crooked because I mirrored the back patterns and shouldn't have (I did NOT read the instructions from the original pattern - bad girl !) but other than that, I think it is pretty cute.

- I also topstitched the serged seams on top because it looked warped and did not hang properly - I just used the longest stitch.  Here is a picture of the back of the dress to show the seams:

If you click on the picture, you can see the seamlines on the back part.  You can also see that I had to use the wrong side of the orange because it was brighter.

- The collar part is stiffened with some lining piece I had on hand and I added a decorative stitch, just like mommy's dress.

wrong side (warpy lining...) before ironing...

Here are pictures of the decorative stitches on daughter's dress and on mommy's dress:

I am also working on a messenger bag made with my red cords.  I had to patch the flap (white wavy stitch) and I decided to decorate it with a cute Chestchire cat design (from the Urban Threads Alice in Wonderland design pack).  I made it in Yellow for it to pop.  I am just waiting to get some kind of red strap because I am out of the red cord fabric (ah, the wonderful world of clothes reconstruction).

                                             

Isn't this cat too cute !!!

So, you get the picture.  I will post the final result in a few days (when it is finished).

And here is a final picture of me wearing my dress when I met one of my idols: Funny man Stéphane Rousseau:

OMG what a gorgeous man !!!

So it is all for now.  Hope you come back to follow my, albeit slow, progress towards fashion show readiness !!!

Peace !

Claudia