Successive Ruffles

I've made lots of knitted dresses for my grandniece Cauliflower over her short life, but she's going on nine now and it's time to make the move to sewing dresses rather than knitting them. This year, for her ninth birthday, I decided to sew the first dress for her.

The dress pattern I chose for her was McCall's M7274. And of course there must be a purse made to go with it, so I used a drawstring bag pattern from Vogue 9893, a pattern I bought about 17 years ago and that's no longer available.

And here's the completed dress and purse. It was surprisingly difficult to find an appropriate material for it. It seemed like every printed jersey fabric I saw in the stores was either too adult or just plain ugly. Finally I came across this pink flowered jersey and picked it up on the spot because Cauliflower's favourite colour is pink, only to learn a month or so later that I'm out of the loop on her favourite colours, which are now blue and turquoise. Sigh.

The contrast fabric was supposed to be a non-fraying fabric such as tulle or lace, but it was difficult to find a fabric that went with the jersey, so I settled on a very light crepe in a coral pink that was a good match to the pink flowers on the fabric. This cost me some extra work in sewing, as that crepe had to be hemmed, and then the jersey flounces had to have a correspondingly deeper hem allowance if the hemmed underlay ruffles were going to show. I had also barely done any ruffling at all in my sewing experience, and I'd certainly never done tiered ruffles, so that was a new experience. Ruffles are actually quite a lot of work, as they have to be seamed, hemmed, gathered, and then first basted and finally stitched in place. And there were six of them to do. It gave me a new appreciation of what nineteenth and eighteenth century seamstresses had to do, given that women's dresses were often ruffled from waist to hem, and why there's so much complaining about sewing ruffles in the novels from the period.

Anyway, the dress and purse are done and it turned out fairly well. I just hope Cauliflower will like it.