New dress for Bubs!

Whoa! I left for a while, totally not meaning to (at least for that long), and I came back to a new Blogger! Holy cow! Guess I have to learn what the new buttons do. ;) Well, I've been working on a few projects, between people being sick. I've been enjoying being a pattern reviewer on occasion for Peek a Boo Pattern Shop. It's fun to get a pattern to try out for free. This one was a little trickier than the party dress I did a few months ago in a lot of ways. The party dress had tons of ruffles and had little buttonholes to worry about (and my sister-in-law loved it for my niece, btw!), but this one had piping, which I'd never done and was TERRIFIED of, and a zipper, plus it was fully lined. I do love fully lined dresses. I normally use "cheaper" fabrics for them, since it's not going to matter if you can see through the dress a little bit. And since I have four little kids who go through clothes like crazy, saving a little bit of money is really helpful. I was creative with the colors this time, so my daughter got a rainbow dress. She loves it, though, so I'm glad it worked out. She's almost 7, so she's starting to get picky about what she wears and I picked out the fabric without her. I was REALLY grateful that I didn't do all of that work, just to have her declare that she hates it and won't wear it. In fact, the opposite happened and I couldn't get it off of her the first day after I finished it! The piping wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, although I did discover that I liked using my regular foot, instead of a zipper foot. I don't have a piping foot for my machine and my mom didn't have one for hers (she's always just used the zipper foot), so that wasn't an option. I found with the zipper foot, that the fabric was always sliding out and I wasn't getting a clean line. So some of my seams on my piping are NOT pretty. But once I switched to the regular foot, I was able to put the piping under the foot on one side and it kept the fabric in place. It was fantastic. Of course, my machine likes to really pinch the fabric, so the piping was squished, rather than the foot being up high, so that might have made the difference. The zipper was really easy to put in, once I faced it the right direction. I had an oops moment, there, but quickly realized my mistake. Anyway, here are some pictures along with a link to the actual pattern with pictures of other reviewers' dresses. It's called the Birthday Girl dress, which I thought was really cute.  (Can I just mention how much I love the black and white dress at that link? That was a great choice of fabrics!)