Ta-dah!

Ta-dah! Two dresses made for Dress-a-Girl-Around-the-World. I went through one (of at least 5...) of my boxes of fat quarters, wondering what to use and how to stitch the pieces together to have something large enough to make a small dress. Most of what I pulled out had bits cut off/out from my patch work days and it would have required a fair amount of sewing to begin with and I wanted to just crack on with the first one really. Fiddly bits can come later. Then I remembered the backing fabrics I had tucked away. I knew I had given some to a craft group a while ago but had kept some in case I ever made the quilts they were intended to back. (I haven't yet...)
I know the photo below makes it look like I bought a whole bolt of fabric but I didn't! It's actually a 5m length, found in a sale at the last big quilt show I went to at Ascot - I think it was reduced to about £3-£4 a metre and they let me have the board to store it on. Having looked through all the sizings for the dresses, I settled on size 3, which meant I could make 2 dresses from one cut length of 36"/90cm. Folded in half along the selvage, then cut along the fold - the selvage will become part of the hemline.

I'd popped to the shops for bias binding and elastic and managed to find some red satin binding that I thought would stay quite soft once stitched. Not having access to a printer at home, I had to guess at the armholes but one of the tutorials I'd looked at had a nice helpful photo of the dress cut out ready to sew, laying on a cutting mat, so you could judge the size from the markings on the cutting board.
The actual sewing took me about an hour or so for the first dress but only 45 mins for the second one, once I knew what I was doing. It had also been a long time since I'd used bias binding, so I finished the second dress a little differently.

 

In the picture on the left, after attaching the binding, I folded it over and top stitched along both edges of the binding. In the picture on the right - the second dress - I folded the binding over a little further on the wrong side, so the top stitching is on the join and I left off the outer edge top stitching. But I think I over did the extra stitching where the binding meets the elastic. The original designer stressed that the dresses must be very robust and stand up to possible harsh washing conditions but I did too much. I'll do less next time. And the finished dress?...Ta-dah!!!

Considering that I didn't have to pay for fabric, or thread come to that - it was bought and paid for years ago - it has only cost about £1.25 to make!! Although I might buy some braid to put round the bottom edge and somewhere I have some plain orange fabric I can use to make a pocket.

I went through quite a lengthy phase of liking shades of royal blue and aqua, so the next dress may be made from those.
I've now added a button on the side bar that will take you to the official Dress a Girl Around the World website. There is also a UK specific website HERE which is really good.

There was going to be a second ta-dah but it became a ta-dah that wasn't... Remember way back in my very first post how I mentioned that I love to see the number of views my stripey blanket has received on my Ravelry page?? Well, I realised it was about to reach the MAGIC number 7777!!! So the whole time I was sewing, I kept going back for another look and it slooowy went up. Well, it reached the point where it got to 7776 but I had to go out for the evening (a quiz night and we did really badly!!). By the time I was able to check again it had reached 7778...so I leave you with an image of the ta-dah that wasn't...