We don’t quite know what to call the season we’re currently experiencing out here in the Pacific Northwest. Our calendars claim that Summer begins tomorrow, but I think we’re at least three months behind. In other words, we’re just now getting our Spring. I think we should adjust our calendars accordingly so that we don’t feel so disappointed when we look outside. At any rate, back when our calendars claimed it was Spring, Rana and I checked her closet for Springtime dresses and found that she had outgrown everything from last year. I’ve already shown one dress that I made for her, so now I’ll show the others I’ve finished.
Please excuse the fuzzy baby head zooming through the photo.
This dress began life as a pair of pillowcases that I rescued from the thrift store for 99 cents a piece. Not too shabby, eh? I’m all about saving myself time, so I kept the original pillowcase hem for the skirt. Despite the stripes, the dress looked too plain once I had finished, so I embellished it with a hand-painted daffodil. See? Sometimes I can paint.
Who else wishes they were in Hawaii?
This was the first of my Hawaiian shirt conversions and at first, it went very, very wrong. I had used Rana’s Easter dress as a template, but… I only traced one side and then just folded the shirt in half and cut. Moral of the story: Trace both sides of your template, just to be sure. I happily went sewing along, thinking it would make a good surprise for Rana when she got home from school. And we were all surprised when we found that this dress was too skinny even to fit Konik, my 18 month old son. Obviously, some alterations were in order. I didn’t want to lose the button placket on the back because that would make more work for me. So I whacked off the top half of the front, took my daughter’s measurement (sometimes I do smart things), and scavenged among the scraps of the original shirt. Lucky for me, when I opened up one of the sleeves on the side seam, it was just the width I needed, and I sewed it right on. You can see the hem of the sleeve now marks the dress’ waistline (through the middle of the trees). How’s that for creative sewing? I was going to put little flutter sleeves on the dress, but Rana preferred the wide straps. I wasn’t going to complain — less work! (Notice a theme, here?)
The taste, the taste, the taste is gonna move ya!!
This dress was fun. How can you not be happy looking at fruit fabric? This was just a small, lonely piece of fabric hanging sadly between placemats and sheets at the thrift store. It needed a better life, so I saved it, too. When I got it home, I found that there were strange black smudges in a couple of places, so I had to get creative with how I cut out the pieces. It all worked out ok, though! The skirt fabric was leftover from a hospital gown I made for a friend a couple years ago (she wanted to have her baby in style, not some faded hospital-issue sack). Once again, Rana was at school while I was sewing, so there was no measuring involved. This dress is ankle length on her and, if not for the citrus fruit and bright colors, would look a little “Texas compound,” but she thinks the length is great. I’ll just be sure never to do her hair up in a bun when she wears this.
Current work in progress is the bright pink dress with the patchwork skirt. I admire the people who can sew without the use of patterns, but I think I’m ready to admit that I am not one of those people. The two pillowcases I hacked up didn’t yield enough fabric to make this into, well, a dress. It’s going to have to be something more akin to a tunic. And, much to Rana’s disgruntlement, it’s going to have to be for Granota. There was simultaneous shrieking and cheering at that announcement. Hopefully, the girls don’t try to reenact the Cinderella shredding-of-the-dress scene whenever Granota wears this.
Tomorrow, I’m going to attempt something cool. I’ll post about it if I get it done in time!
Two Frogs and a Grasshopper 
