Make Gnome Mistake...

...this might just be the cutest dress ever!

The adorable Miss Polly Polkadot recently approached me to make her a dress.  But not just any dress - a recreation of this dress:

And yes, you are totally right in thinking that this is a little girls dress.

This appealed to me for obvious reasons.  Not only is this dress adorable, but making an adult version just sounded like so much fun!  How wonderful to find someone as crazy as me!!

It took a little while to find the fabric for a reasonable price (some fabric prices on ebay are highway robbery, let me tell you!), but once it was here I couldn't wait to get started!

I decided to use my favourite blouse pattern as the basis for the bodice.  I use this pattern a lot!

I copied the pattern pieces onto some pattern paper and made the adjustments I needed to make:

Then I set about making the bodice, whilst Stella sooked on the floor because I wasn't paying attention to her:

I cut the bodice pieces out twice so I could line it and construct it like I did in this post, so all the seams are on the inside.  Really makes for a neat finish!  Then I made set my mind to the skirt.  I had three yards to gather up to a length of about 23 inches.  This is a lot of gathering but thankfully it did gather up that small, and having that much fabric gathered up made the skirt look really dense and full!  The skirt was then attached to the bodice, and I had this:

You will have to excuse the fact that this dress is hanging on a hanger instead of on a dress form.  Even when I purchased the smallest dress form I could get, by the time I put the zipper in, I couldn't get the dress over the forms shoulders...sigh!

Next thing was the belt.  The original dress had a sash that tied at the back in a bow.  This is all well and good if you an adult dressing your child, you can tie that bow for them.  This is a hard thing to do on yourself.  So I decided to make a belt with a bow attached to one end of it, so when you did up the snaps you had what looked like a sash tied in a bow... a really fancy bow!

But I was worried about all that work blending in to the polkadotted fabric, since it was going to be made from polkadots too...  I dug through my stash of stuff and came up with a white mini bobble trim - PERFECT!  After a couple of hours work I had this:

I love the way that the mini bobble trim echoes the polkadots!

And here is the finished dress!

 

 

Its just SO ADORABLE!!!!!  I just can't wait to see a picture of Miss Polly wearing it!!!

Beccie
xxx