Friday, January 16, 2009

3 in one

It's about time I told you about our family pictures. We had them taken way back in November.
I guess I should show you the dress I was working on that day when I was sewing and the time ran away from me too.
Also, I've become aware of a shabby apple contest going on. You all know what a sucker I am for a contest!
Fitting all three of these things into a single post? Am I a master of efficiency or what?
Here goes. Three pictures of my "Picture Princess" girl. All from our family photo shoot with Kaylea in November.
Why Should my Zizza be the picture princess?

Because she's smiley,

and dreamy,

With a little bit of spunk for good measure.

By the way, Peach Cobbler is the dress I think would best suit my Zizza.


Now, that takes care of the contest portion of this post, let's move on to the day eating dress. Or dresses to be more accurate.
This ensemble started one Sunday at church when I saw a little girl wearing a tuxedo ruffled dress and got to thinking about how I could inject a little more uniquety into the the look. The answer I came up with was to add a stand-up collar and french cuffs and layer it under a wide necked sweater dress.
I bought a women's sized cream sweater to use for the sweater dress. I thought I was going to have to do some creative cutting to get the pieces I needed for the dress with ribbing in all the right places, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the ribbing was just top-stitched to the sweater in the first place.
I ripped out those seams and had all the ribbing I needed ready to stitch onto my dress wherever I wanted it without worrying about anything unraveling. It was like that sweater was meant to be ripped apart an re-purposed!
I originally thought of dotted swiss for the dress fabric. I wanted strong color, but solid would be too harsh. I needed that little bit of texture to soften things up. I didn't find any brightly colored dotted swiss so I started exploring my options.
The pattern in the fabric I chose works just as well to soften things as the texture of the dots would have but it's subtle enough not to overwhelm. Perfect.
For picture day,I knew I wanted her to be wearing knee socks with her clogs. I also didn't want to be too matchy-matchy about things. I found the adult sized argyle socks at Target. I hacked off the feet and hemmed the remaining tubes into leg warmers. Then I made the hair bow out of one of the discarded feet.
After all of that I found the same style of socks in the little girls section. I like the scrunchy leg-warmer look though, not to mention the matching bow, so I'm glad I didn't find the child-sized socks first.
And that, Friends, is all I have to say about it.

2 comments:

Tazia said...

That is amazing, seriously you are so creative! I love it. She is such a doll, and I cant believe you made that darling outfit. Have you ever considered designing clothes? I would definitely get your designs.

Melissa M. said...

She deserves that peach cobbler dress!