Sew-vivor Entry

Over at Family Ever After, Rachel is hosting Season 2 of Sew-vivor. I've decided this will be my audition entry for this season. I feel I should give you the back story for this dress. 

About 10 months ago I received an email from a gal that is best friends with one of my favorite sisters-in-law. And had previously asked me to make a carseat cover for her newest addition. This is what it said,

Tiffany,

I have a pretty important and special sewing task I would be interested in talking to you about.  I want to take my girls blessing dresses that I had specially made for them and make them into the white dress they wear on their baptismal day. 

 My oldest daughter will be turning eight in August and will be baptized in September.  I thought if I gave you plenty of notice this might be something we could ... convert the beautiful blessing dress into a baptism dress.  

~Mindy

Of course I said YES!!! I love a challenge, and stretching my abilities.

I could kick myself for not taking a picture of the blessing dress that she wore as a small infant but found one that looks similar so you could get the idea. 

photo source

There was one trick though. I had to be able to use the fabric is such a way on the new baptism dress so that it could be used as the veil someday when she gets married. Yikes! What a challenge! But, challenge accepted.  It reminded me of the poem My Three White Dresses.

I started by making two sample dresses because Mindy kind of knew what she wanted but wasn't a hundred percent sure. She knew she wanted cap sleeves and a square neck, and that because she was getting baptized when it was still warm she wanted the dress to hit mid-calf. I whipped these two dresses up and we decided to combine the two.

I felt very inadequate to take on such a task, but one quick snip of the scissors on the blessing dress and it was no turning back. I used Simplicity 5704 and shortened the sleeves just slightly and instead of added a band, put in an elastic. 

Then I added a liner and hand stitched all the little beads to the bodice. The flower I also made using a similar satin burning technique to the one found here. I found these antique looking buttons at Wal-Mart and fell in love with them. I stitched the flower and button to the dress rather than gluing it together. 

This project also introduced me to tricot fabric. The top/shortest layer is the layer from the blessing dress with 2" ribbon added to it. I had also never done an overlay on a dress the didn't go exactly half way down the middle. It had to be off-center. It was a measure like 6 times, cut once instead of measure twice, cut once situation. I also loved the elastic in the cap sleeve.

Considering this sweet little gal lives 200 miles away and I didn't get to try it on her AT ALL, it fits her like a glove. 

Wish me luck and make sure to hop over to Family Ever After and check out the other auditions and good luck to everyone!