Saturday, July 11, 2009

Look Familiar?

This is Butterick 5019, the childrens' version of the Retro dress I was considering for the contest (previous post). Here's my review, but in a nutshell...
  • The only difference is that the adult version has a circle skirt, while this one is more of an A-line. Oh, and it's also worn backwards from the adult version (ties in back vs. ties in front).
  • I strongly recommend purchasing double fold bias tape for this project. It might cost more, but you'll save yourself about 2 hours, and be done in half the time!
  • Just over a yard required, not quite a "1 yard wonder" but pretty darn close!
  • After making it for Little Miss Princess, I'm pretty sure I don't want to do it again for myself. That's a lot of bias tape!!! Not to mention that most of you agree the Vogue is better and the Butterick has fit issues.

The floral print cotton came from Gorgeous Fabrics, and since the pre-made tape offerings at Jo-ann's didn't even come close to matching, I bought the blue quilter's cotton there and made my own. I had a lot of bias strips cut and a little left over, so I used some for the button tab in the front (underneath). The pattern has you make a stand-along piece with 2 button holes, but I think that would get lost in the laundry pretty fast!


I also used my left over strips for the tie backs. Cut on the bias, I stitched 2 strips together, but didn't turn them inside out. I wanted to stay with the top-stitching theme and even if they fray a little, that's fine, the dress could use a little character. Little Miss Princess put it on and said, "Oh, I *love* it!" so that's good, right? In the above picture, you'll notice the flowered tab the ties pass through on the back? Very, very necessary, otherwise if the dress fall down in front, it comes up in back and we don't want that!
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Gonna be a busy week for me, got 20 more shirts to embroider for another fire department (by Friday) and 4 more essays to write. Yuck. Good news: Only 6 weeks until NYC, though!!! Bad news: Only 7 more weeks until school starts again!

One last thing... My nephew's wife is trying to teach herself to sew, but her native language is Spanish. They live in Colorado (they visited this weekend), and I'm trying to find some Spanish resources for a beginner. Only some of the commercial patterns are printed in Spanish (all in English/French), and I'm not sure she's ready for Patrones. If you have any ideas, let me know... Thanks!

12 comments:

gwensews said...

Isn't that just the cutest little dress! Good luck with your contest piece.

Michelle said...

That dress is so adorable! As much as I enjoy making little shirts for my nephews, I would LOVE to make a flowery, frilly dress from time to time. Maybe I can talk one of my friends into having a little girl!!

Anonymous said...

I need to get this pattern! I like a simple dress for the girls that I can just reuse and embellish with ric-rac and bias strips to jazz them up.
Good luck on the embroidery!

marysews said...

That dress is too cute, and the self-fabric tie channel is quite ingenious!

Since I live in Florida, I thought all the second-language sheets would be in Spanish. I was wrong. I pulled out a few patterns to check and found that Butterick has French, while McCall's and Simplicity have Spanish (I only pulled two of each).

The Sewing and Knitting Loft said...

What a cute little dress! The fabric is just perfect for it!

Barb

Diana said...

The dress is really cute!! Great work!

Bunny said...

Adorable dress. This one is definitely going on my list.

Dawn said...

Cute! I love that sunny yellow color.

Julia said...

I just made this pattern for my grands, but I made it reversible so I used ties on the front and the back. They tie it underneath rather than button. Mine are in red, white, and blue. I used piping on one and would not recommend that! I love the blue and yellow. I posted about mine a few posts back.

Summerset said...

That's so cute! Check with Gwen, she has taught two Mexican women to sew, and I think that in the beginning, neither party spoke too much of the other's language: http://afterthedress.blogspot.com

Gwen said...

You can search books on amazon.com for the word "costura" (which means sewing) and find books like the one by Singer called "El ABC de la Costura" for your nephew's wife. A couple of the pattern companies do print all of their instructions in Spanish - I'll have to check when I get home to see which ones, but I'm pretty sure that Burda does. If you decide that you want to sew with her, then I can send you the Spanish-English sewing vocabulary lists that I put together to help me communicate with my students. Also, if you sew with her, the nice thing about sewing is that you can SHOW a lot without having to necessarily talk about it. One good piece of advice that I got was to say / ask "Permiso?" (permission?) before taking over for a step that she is not doing correctly. It's a little thing, but it REALLY came in handy! Feel free to email me if you want to talk more about this: gwendolyn_campbell@hotmail.com
Good luck and take care,
Gwen

Amy said...

I'm not showing this to my little girl...she'd be jealous, lol :) Very, very cute!