Another weekend, another dress

Yes, I am on a roll with sewing. I have found that I really enjoy it so I figured, why not continue?

Last weekend, I decided to make a dress similar to this one. I figured it'll be a good fall dress for JOE. 

I have been loving all the chevron patterns I have seen on Pinterest so I decided to choose that as my pattern. Since I am not very creative when it comes to colors, I decided to use grey as the other color for the bodice.

So here we go.

I got all the way to the end and realized that while I do know how to sew buttons, I DO NOT know how to make button holes. I thought the ones on the original tutorial were decorative! So I decided to use my imagination and just cut some holes then hand-sewed around it. I am sure there is a setting on the sewing machine to complete buttons but I didn't feel like reading the manual again. 

The original pattern didn't come with a bow. So why a bow? Well, besides making the dress a little more unique, turns out I cut the bodice wrong. I measured JOE at 19.5 inches around her chest. The tutorial said to add 3-inches which I did...I brought it up to 23 inches. WROTE DOWN 23-inches then proceeded to cute 13 inches!

Anyways, I decided to improvise and add a bow to allow for more spacing around the chest area.

And here is my little princess modeling her new dress. She wouldn't stand still so I had to improvise a little :-).

Expertise needed: Comfortable beginner.

Total approximate cost: $5 (chevron material was about $3.73 for 3/4 yard from Wal-mart and the grey material was $0.97 from Wal-mart)

Total time spent sewing dress: Approximately 4-hours. It would have been closer to 3 but I needed more time to figure out the button situation in addition to adding a bow. The bow itself didn't take much time to make but assembling it was a little more tricky until I figured out that I could use a safety pin to assist with turning the material inside out. 

Feedback: I think it is a very cute dress. I will make another one again when JOE is older. Hopefully, I'll cut the materials with the right measurement as well :-). It was a labor of love and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

After sewing, I decided to do some blogging but JOE wasn't having any of that. So I set up a separate laptop for her. I figured she can use my very old Windows XP laptop. It seems to have done the trick. She even thinks she can type!

We got JOE an activity center/walker on Monday. She spent a good 30-minutes alone playing with it. I was amazed because she always likes either J or I or her nanny to interact with her when she plays. 

Definitely a good buy!

Happy hump day!