Finish it Up Friday - The Curtain Dress

Pinterest strikes again!  I found a pin linking to this tutorial and decided to give it a whirl.  Turns out the dimensions for the dress they made was for a much older girl than my little 2 year old, so I had to do some finagling to size it down.  Aside from an attempt to make a Biblical times costume for VBS when I was in high school (very sad fail...), this was my first attempt at garment sewing.  Yay!

It walks like a dress, it talks like a dress, it must be a dress!

It's all straight line sewing, so it was super easy.  It really is a curtain with a ruffle at the top , sewn into a tube and hemmed.  You put some elastic in the casing where the curtain rod would go and add some straps. The tutorial had the width of the body of the dress at 36", I tried it on her at 30", and took off 6 more inches before being happy with it.  There was just too much bunching under her arms and I think it was bothering her.

It falls at her knee, and I wish I had made it a little longer so she can grow with it, and there's not much hem to let out, either.  But Andrea can always wear it ; )

 I made this dress in a few sittings while she was a the sitter or napping, so I did a lot of guessing, measuring dresses that fit her, and two quick fittings to get the straps right.  She cried and tried to take it off during both fittings, so I was a little nervous that she wouldn't wear the dress, so I decided to make a matching dress for her baby from some of the scraps as an incentive to wear it.  It worked ; )

It's a lot easier to get the doll to model, than an active 2 year old! 

The doll's dress was a quick 20 minute project and I'm so glad I did it!

I made this dress for her to wear at her birthday party, but I'm really wanting her to wear it to church ASAP...we'll see if I can hold off!  I think there's one in Andrea's future!