Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Flower Girl Dress & Bow Ties

My older two children take violin lessons.  In fact, E has been taking them for almost 5 years!  3 for WD.  Their violin teacher is getting married!  I am so happy for her, and devastated that she's moving out of state :(.

Anyway, I've known her for a long time, and she has seen me sewing various projects as I wait during lessons, so she asked if I could make the flower girl dress and a couple of boys bow ties for the wedding.

 Snoopy sporting one of the bow ties.
The green is a silk taffeta (I think).  I did interface the bow tie, because I didn't want to regret not doing so, but in reality, I'm not sure I needed to.  The green silk is pretty stiff on it's own.
The dress is a beautiful cream silk dupioni.  It has a lovely sheen to it along with all the interesting texture.  Makes you wonder who the heck looked at a silk worm cocoon, decided to unravel it and create thread from it.  Amazing.
The pattern used is Simplicty 1924, an 'Inspired by Project Runway' pattern.  A fine pattern of itself, the designer 'tips' are really just common sense, and a little silly.  But I suppose the Project Runway name sells, and maybe gets new people interested in sewing. 

A sash of the green was requested, one that went all the way around, so I just extended the side ties pattern.  I definitely could have tied a better bow in that picture!
Interestingly, I did have to do a button placket of sorts, which I've never come across quite like this, but it turned out just fine.  Still learning new things!
A close up of the fabric and buttons.  The buttons came from my stash.
Front view, no sash.  Really a pretty basic dress.   It is fully lined, with a net ruffle attached to the skirt slip for extra fullness at the bottom.  I am delivering it this afternoon - I sure hope she's happy with it.  That's the scary part of sewing for others; fulfilling their expectations within my abilities.

More details:  The dress is a size 2.  Hard to tell from the pictures, I realized.  Perhaps after the wedding in a couple of weeks, I'll have pictures of the flower girl in the dress.
The bow ties were made using the pattern from thismamamakesstuff.  I used velcro in the back to attach it after I tied the bow using this tutorial on the web.












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