Lilac, lace and a toddler who won’t sit still …

Life has been a little crazy lately, so I’m just now getting around to sharing photos of the Easter dress I made for the future quilter.

I don’t get to do too much garment sewing, so I’m certainly not an expert, but I am getting better. And I just LOVE sewing something frilly for my daughter who turns two next month. The first thing she did when she put this dress on is start spinning around. We’ve definitely reached the girly stage. And we’ve also reached the, “I have better things to do than sit still for a photo” stage. That means other than a blurry, photo of my color coordinated family, the only photos of the dress are the ones of it hanging by itself.

I had hoped to have a nice, catalog-esque photo where we all coordinated beautifully, were smiling and just looked happy to be with each other. But this one shows the real us, a busy toddler, a husband who just wants to take his tie off and a mom trying to keep it all together. It is beautiful in its own way, even if it won’t make it onto the family photo wall.

The pattern is New Look 0953 and I made it with a satin body with a lace overlay. I chose a more modern lace that I could cut to turn it into a scalloped bottom. Lace and satin can be tricky to work with. Satin tends to slip on you and lace can be stretchy.  I found a few tricks to help was to use a 28mm rotary cuter to trace around the pattern edges help me get a clean cut without the fabric slipping, stretching and getting out of shape. The small size of the blade made it easy to maneuver around curves.

Also make sure you have pins and needles designed to sew through satin. You don’t want to run your quilting needle through this stuff.

Have you made anything special for your kids or grandchildren lately?