Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The Latest Sewing Project: Sadie's Princess Dress- Night #1

A week or so ago we received this catalog in the mail. Sadie went through and showed me her favorite costumes. Then she came across this costume. It was love at first sight. She sat, staring at the picture, and protested if I suggested she look at some of the other dresses.

Since we aren't going to be in the market for an incredibly expensive, quickly outgrown costume anytime soon, I decided to begin sewing a princess dress for Sadie. If this one turns out I'll get some blue fabric next time it's on sale and make her a Cinderella dress eventually (she's a big Cinderella fan). I'm hoping to find a certain brocade that I'm very fond of on sale again!

I began work on the top half of the dress after I tucked the girls in tonight. It's going to have puffy light pink crepe sleeves, light pin crepe skirt poofs (for want of a better word... I'm really not sure what those round-ish things are called that are on the side of top of the skirts of most Cinderella dresses...) and a bright pink crepe skirt. Since I have quite a bit of each of those fabrics the only thing I don't have on hand is the velcro for the back.

I do see a lot of hand sewing in my future. The beaded lace is really very thick and I know there's no way my sewing machine could do anything other than make a huge mess out of it... So after I finish my blog posts for the night I'm going to start stitching.

Here's what I have so far (I didn't show the two back pieces which have also been cut out):


And a close up of the project so you can see the different fabrics...


Paul's pretty proud of the fact that he picked out the lace trim. It did seem like the perfect added touch!

5 comments:

  1. I think that the poofy overskirt thingies are called panniers...could be wrong.

    I love what you're doing with this dress, and beg for "finished" pictures!

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  2. It looks great. If we didn't have another little girl on the way I'd happily send you some of our princess costumes. Seven years ago we hit the princess costume jackpot at the Disney Store and I scored many dresses in lots of sizes for about $7 a dress. Both of my girls have loved a particular silky hot pink princess dress that we got from Gymboree ages ago. The dress (in multiple sizes) has been worn quite often over the past seven years.

    I'm sure Sadie will love the beautiful dress you're making for her.

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  3. This is my absolute favorite fabric store for making costumes: http://www.triadplusfabrics.com/ I've been going here for years and always make sure I check out their clearance section for flat folds in my favorite choice of color, weave, weight, and sometimes print. How can you go wrong when a $50 per yard piece of fabric goes to the clearance table for $4 per yard because it's a remnant and then even better it's on sale again because they are trying to get rid of inventory and it goes down to $1 per yard. A renaissance dress would end up costing me less than $10 to make in fabric that if I bought full price could be anywhere from $200-$1000. I love saving money. If you come to Sacramento make sure to check out this fabric store, I'll even show you around if you drop me an email. :)

    The dress looks great. Hand sewing is very important so that the trim goes on well. We use to attach trim with a zig zag stitch in the same color of the trim. That might work for you. Don't do a straight stitch, it'll lift on the sides and won't capture all the trim.

    The side puffy fabric at the hips would have actually been an over skirt that was pulled to reveal a portion of the underskirt. In portraits from the renaissance time through the 1700s you'll see this is very popular. It was a display of wealth, that your petticoats were made from expensive fabrics. It seemed to go out of style during Jane Austin's time when they suddenly reverted to a more Grecian style. Check out: http://www.costumes.org/history/100pages/timelinepages/timeline.htm

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  4. To bad Sadie is way to small for my Cinderella dress. I have a wonderful dress that my mom made when I was about 10. It is hanging in my closet at my house. Being the Speech pathologist and trying to motivate kids I used costumes to convince them to cooperate and used them as rewards. I have the whole princess costume thing. Shoes, tiara, dress, scepter, white gloves. I've even got a gold headband. I've got a prince costume too. I know, I'm crazy but my kids will eventually be very happy.

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  5. This is going to be so pretty! My daughter would love it!

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