
I bought the material quite a while ago, with the intention of making a dress for her. She has this sundress that she picked out when she was really little (It's a size 2T, so she might have been 3) that she ended up loving so much that she wore it as a shirt up until last summer. Haven't checked recent to see if it still fits her at all. So, I bought the material thinking she needed/wanted a new sundress. It's from the Denyse Schmidt line for chain stores, the Aunt Edna set. I may have even paid full price for it. But I never really found "the" pattern for it. Until I started seeing the Made By Rae Geranium Dress pattern around at different places, but mostly Pinterest. I emailed my husband the link and asked for it for Mother's Day. He checked it out and bought it!
I didn't think I had quite enough to make the long skirt, the bodice and the bodice lining out of the fabric I had, so I picked up some red-tag coordinating fabric ($3/yard and $3/yard quality too) from the J on Friday. I printed out the pattern, taped it together. My only issue was that I wished the registration symbols of where to tape it together were a little different from each other for each join. You really only had the spacing to work off of. I cut out the pieces Saturday night.
This morning, I got out the old sewing machine and put together the bodice. I took a break for board games with El and went back to it later in the morning. I got all the machine sewing done by lunch time, even with helping with math homework while sewing. On a side note, I may be teaching La some bad "narrowing down the choices" habits to cut down on the amount of work required.
I had a little trouble with the buttonholes. Not because of the pattern, but because I'm a goofball who was careful about everything but the buttonholes. So, there are 4 of them for 2 buttons. See the bad habits on cutting down the amount of work required. The sewing machine has a thing where once it learns 1 button hole it can make a bunch more just like it. If I had made a "swatch" buttonhole, then the first one would have been right. The second one got bunged up because the fabric was pretty thick where I tried to put it. The whole time I was doing this, I thought it would be OK because they would be underneath. After lunch, I remembered that the button side is the bottom and the button holes are on top. So, there's kind of an oddball piece of ric-rac covering the superfluous buttonholes.

Other than my own mistakes, I'm really happy with how the dress turned out. I think El will wear it a lot. I'm certain I will make more of these for her and for others.
P.S. One of the winning features is side seam pockets. I hadn't even realized they were there until I taped the pattern pieces together.
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