The Secret Garden Dress

 

When it came time to plan my honorary niece Olivia's birthday dress for her seventh birthday in May of 2023, I began by ordering three sewing patterns online: one for this year, for for next year, and one for the year after, in order to save on shipping. It was still way too expensive, but I suppose I can at least save the patterns to reuse for my new little grandniece when she gets older.

My choice of pattern this year was the very classic Vogue V1857, view B. I went to the warehouse-type store Fabric Fabric, at St. Clair West and Keele here in Toronto, to pick out the fabrics for it. I found a beautiful cotton print -- the one depicted above -- that I fell in love with immediately. It was so William Morris. It wasn't the easiest print to coordinate because of its offbeat shades of green and blue, but for my contrast fabric I eventually picked out a textured cotton fabric in cream, and then, when I couldn't find a suitable third fabric to use as lining, I bought extra of the textured cream to use as lining. 

Here's the finished product. It's crisply, delicately pretty. The sewing went reasonably well on the whole, though I was stalled for quite a while when I had some difficulty with the sleeves. I had never been able to make the "baste and draw the stitches to gather" technique work for me, but when my usual method of minutely pinning the sleeve didn't work despite multiple attempts, I tried the gathered basting stitch technique, and to my amazement, it actually worked for me for once. 

Whenever I make a little girl's dress, I like to make a matching purse for it. I wanted to make this one out of the print, but I hadn't enough of it left. I hadn't enough left for even the facing. But I did have lots of the cream left, and I made a very simple, plain bag out of that. Olivia will be able to use this purse with other outfits instead of having a purse that's tied specifically to one outfit.

My formula for Olivia's gifts, either birthday or Christmas, is "something to wear, something to read, and something to play with". This past winter I had the great good luck to score a pristine condition, deluxe edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (shown on the left in the photo above) at my neighbourhood Value Village. It has artistic, interactive inserts throughout it for the reader to enjoy as they read the book, such as postcards, or letters one can take out of the the envelope and read, a drawing of the floorplan of the house, etc. Then, about a week after I bought the book, I came across a copy of The Secret Garden cookbook (shown on the right) at the dollar store. I thought Olivia would really enjoy getting to make some of the foods mentioned in the novel, or the kind of foods the characters would have eaten (that is, if one of her parents is up for such a project), so I snapped up the cookbook. And then I realized the print of the dress, which I'd selected before I bought either the novel or the cookbook and never thought of when I bought the two books, was very much in accord with The Secret Garden theme of this present. How fortuitous is that?

But, you ask, looking at this photo of the dress, purse, novel and cookbook, as fastidiously in thematic accord as it all is, where is the something to play with? A cookbook isn't exactly a toy. Rest assured that there's more to the gift yet to come. The toy Olivia is getting for her seventh birthday is handmade and rather elaborate, so it's getting its own post. Watch this space for that!