Last Wednesday I told you all a little about the
first dress I made and promised to figure out where I found the tutorial... Just when I thought I had lost the tutorial for good and there was no hope in finding it ever again... Guess what?! Yep, I found it. Haha, nothing is impossible. ;)
I found this tutorial over at
Craftiness Is Not Optional, and it was actually a guest post from
Little Big Girl Studio. At the time I just wanted to finally MAKE something with my new sewing machine (that I so cleverly wrecked the tension on... hehe... My
last post explains this.), and of course I wanted it to be somewhat simple, cute, not intimidating... This "peasant dress"/MiniBoden knock-off seemed to fit the bill, and would have been easy enough had I not messed up all of my tension settings before hand... So before we start... Fix your tension settings!... Or if you've never touched them before -
DON'T touch them. ;)
Now, before we go much further, I want to make it clear that I used
this tutorial MOSTLY just for the fabric cutouts/basic instruction and winged it from there. Being fairly new to the sewing world I wasn't comfortable using quite the same technique she did with the elastic thread and opted to use elastic in a casing instead - which I will try my best to explain.
Also, this is for a size 2T dress. If your child is smaller/bigger you may want to research how much bigger your fabric needs to be because I haven't quite mastered all of that...
Basically I followed all of her instructions only making these "tweaks":
I had no fabric marking pen - I used white chalk instead
I had no elastic thread - I used elastic instead
I had no Hem Gauge - I winged my hem :)
I added ribbon and buttons
If you use elastic like I did you may want to add about an inch to your skirt length so that you can fold that over *toward the "wrong side"* 1/4in and then again an inch to create a "tunnel", or whatever you want to call it, for your elastic to go through. Sew close to the edge you folded twice, leaving about an inch open to string the elastic through. AND THEN follow
her instructions on how to attach the skirt to the top. *trying not to sew over the elastic*
Before I created the "tunnel" for the elastic I added two button holes to the front of the skirt so that I could attach ribbon to the ends of my elastic and tie them together (making it easier to adjust on her) instead of having just elastic on the inside of the dress... I also thought it would be a cute addition. If you also decide to do this - you don't have to worry about leaving an inch of the casing open because you will string your elastic through one button hole and out the other.
For the elastic I used enough to go around my daughters waist ONLY 2/3 of the way... then added the ribbon to each end (sewing it on with a zigzag stitch).
For the elastic in the neck area
she explains pretty well how to make that happen in step 6 of
this tutorial.
I hope I didn't make this sound too difficult, it really isn't. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comment section below and I will try to answer them as best as I can, if I don't know the answer I will find it for you. Sorry also for the lack of explanatory photos, I had no idea at the time that I would be blogging about it. :)
