Monday 21 June 2010

A gift for baby Mavis

Friends of ours had a little girl a short while ago. In anticipation of meeting her, I used the free fabric that came along with my copy of Lotta Jansdotter's Simple Sewing for Baby to make the Simple Dress from the book. Having received one of these dresses when Abner was smaller, I knew how great this little dress is and knew it would be the perfect gift for baby Mavis.


From a pattern assembly point of view, it lived up to its name, this was definitely pretty simple. But I did find some aspects a bit confusing. For starters, there were no markings to tell you where to extend the back opening to. Such a small detail, but putting it in the wrong spot could mean wresting with your baby just to get the dress over their head or not getting it over their head at all!


I also wasn't sure how to do the bindings along the neck and sleeves. Having a sample of the dress didn't seem to help since what I was reading on paper and seeing in the real life dress didn't seem to match up. In the end I wound up using the binding more like a facing so I don't get the band of fabric around the edges (which didn't really matter since I wasn't using a contrasting fabric for the binding anyway), nonetheless I'm really happy with how it looks. When I look closely at the pictures in the book, Lotta seems to have done it the same way that I did, but when I searched for pictures of other Simple Dresses online, most people seem to have done it with the contrasting bands.


In the end, the finished dress is so cute and looks more professional that most of the pieces I whip up, so I can hardly complain. I'll have to take a stab at some of the other patterns in the book to see if I have similar problems.

To round out the gift, I also whipped up a pair of pants out of one of my old t-shirts. I guess I could have made the bloomers to go under the dress, but I didn't think I'd have enough of the free fabric to do both. Pants are so much more versatile than bloomers anyway. For the pattern, I used a pair of our favourite pants from when Abner was tiny. Hopefully Mavis will get as much wear out of these pants (top) as we got out of the original (bottom).

2 comments:

  1. so great! it looks awesome and modern in that fabric - very nice indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Finally got to actually give the gift to Mavis. She's a darling little girl who's sure to look super cute in these little numbers!

    ReplyDelete

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