Saturday, December 1, 2012

Waves and Whales Dress

When I saw that Project Run and Play was getting ready to hold auditions, I knew I had to come up with something for it, since I haven't sewn anything but pajamas in recent history and it is a dream of mine to compete on it.  So many ideas went through my mind.  I considered dress up dresses of all kinds including using a scalloped vintage apron pattern as part of the skirt.  


Then I decided to go with something more everyday wearable.  My sister gave me a little bit of vintage fabric for my birthday.  I thought it might be enough for a skirt and I remembered Laurel's outfit she wore for her party.  It was an overall dress with a long sleeve shirt and leggings, super cute!  That was just the right thing.   First, I was going to use an overall pattern and turn it into a dress, but I didn't quite like how I pictured it would turn out.  So next I remembered one of my Ottobre Designs had what I thought were overalls, but they were pants with suspenders.  I almost started with that and worked it into a jumper, but again it wasn't quite right.  So I decided to see what I could find on pinterest (nothing) and then google images.  Finally, I found the perfect pattern and it was a free tutorial!


It was Untrendy Life's Stitch In Color Summer Dress!  I paired a fun whale fabric with turquoise.  Instead of binding, I used orange jumbo ric rac.  Her tutorial was really easy to follow, except I was a little confused on what size to cut the front, so it is fairly narrow.  I might seam rip it and redo it later, but knowing me, probably not.


For the shirt underneath, I used Violette Field Threads' pattern Elise Shirt.  It is a great pattern, because it is super simple and has so many options.  I was going to make leggings to and even cut some out, but when I tried the shirt on Eleanor, I decided that more color would be too much.

She was startled by the popcorn popper being turned on.
Over all, I love how this outfit turned out and Eleanor does too.  She calls it her princess dress.