I wanted to make Christmas a little more special this year by making the girls their own christmas dresses. I was excited to get started on another project and to continue improving my limited skills in sewing.
I bought some material that I thought would not be too Chirstmassy so that they could wear it more than once and found a pattern that I thought would be cute.
This pattern looked cute on the girl on the cover of the pattern so I thought it would work. The patterns were a little courtryish but I thought that as long as I got material the was pretty and modern then it wouldn't look country.
So I set about cuting out the material and trying to make sense of the directions on the pattern. No such luck. I begged my mom for help and to my utter satisfaction she came. She looked at it and helped me figure out what all the little pictures meant. I thought I had a pretty good idea about how to make the dress when she left. I also had to get more material and that is why she couldn't help me start on it when she was there.
The next week I made the top of the dress and worked on making the pockets. I spent 2 full days just on two darn pockets just to later on find out that I put them on in the wrong spot. I was at a point the I did not now what to do next.
My mother saved the day again when I went over there to finishe things up. We worked on the bottom white ruffle then we got the skirt parts together, then we were trying to attach the skirt to the top but the thread kept breaking. Upset, I left and returned the next night with new and expensive thread that I accidentally got and paid for because there was a long line and I didn't want to have to wait any longer in that store.
So I was back at my parents house to finish the dress. The new thread was on and we tried again to gather the material and attach the top. Even with the darn expensive thread it would not work, the material was too thick. So My mother just sewed the gather on and we tried the dress on Lilly.
I was horrified. The dress was way too big. Way too much fabric. It was like she was the top of this humungous tent. I did not want my mom to think I was upset so I was just like," I don't know."
What to do, What to do? I could not take her to church like that. So, I worried about it and finally just told mom that we need to cut out some of the material. She agreed to let me do that and I proceeded to cut up each side of the dress and then pined the side to cut out about 5 inches of material on each side. Then I had to ripe out the pokets that I had spent two days on. We still could not finish the dress, but in all the bustle I took a pattern for a previous dress I had made for Lilly and used that for Miah's dress. There was no way that I was going to attempt the country dress again.
Mom finished both dresses for me and the girls wore them on the Sunday before Christmas.
Miah's dress fit her pretty well considering I had to cut the material a half inch short on all sides of the pattern pieces.
She did look pretty cute.
Then there was Lilly. As much I did not want it to look country, there was just noe escaping it. It was as country a dress as ever I did see one. It did at least look a million times better than what it did before.
Well, I'd say that was another lesson learned. At least Lilly is so cute that she did not look that bad.
I'd day that I will remember this Christmas for a long time. I will remeber how hard of a time that I had with that dress and that in the end you can not trust the picture that is on the cover.
We went sleding the day after Christmas. I was pretty excited about it but it turned out not to be as great as we hoped. By the time that we actually got out and were able to play. The kids Lilly was too cold and Cameron crashed on the first time down with grandpa. Daddy and all the kids ended up sitting in the truck while I went down twice. I had taken a couple of pictures of Jackson and Sarah while on the hill before we left. Zander looked pretty funny they he was hanging out in the sled.
