Mother's Day Sewing

One of the interesting things on FB today was seeing what everyone was doing for Mother's Day.  Some were at the beach, some were spending time visiting family, some were re-creating meals their mom used to make for them.  I made a dress for El.



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.