I sewed a dress!

My mother in law, Gini gave me a wonderful older Husqvarna sewing machine, and I had to give it a test run. A couple days earlier, at a garage sale, I found a pink linen skirt and blouse that was great fabric but not so great fashion, as well as some grey linen shorts. I didn't have a dress pattern to follow, but decided to wing it and traced out the top of a dress that already fit Julia. I added a little room for the seam allowance, and cut out the top from the grey linen and cut the skirt from the pink linen set a bit shorter. I liked the flowers embroidered on the skirt so I decided to leave it in the skirt form and just cut it off about at the right length. I sewed the seams of the top, then pinned the skirt to the top at two sides and kept subdividing it into pleats. I sewed the skirt on and realized that this might actually work. The remaining issue was buttonholes, which I have never done. I downloaded the manual and followed the directions and was amazed that it actually worked quite well. I was nervous about making the buttonholes on the dress itself, and actually sort of screwed the first one up, but was able to recover smoothly and they turned out fine! I chose pink buttons to tie the skirt and top together, and then all that was left was convincing julia to model.

the top, all seamed

the skirt, before attaching

the dress, done!

the model, giggling while sprinting away from me

good thing i don't aspire to participate in baby pageants

So the modeling could have used another 2,000 frames, but it was getting on naptime.While I was sewing, my sister Grace got into experimenting with using linoleum blocks to print on fabric, and she found a box of my dad's old carved blocks and carved some of her own. We hit up some more garage sales and she made some wonderful shirts for julia to wear in the upcoming years.