A Little Girl Dress Reveal and Some Fabric Flowers

Where were we?

Ah yes...two little girl dresses.

Well, the good news is that they got finished in plenty of time for our trip to my brother's wedding but not enough time for me to get the itch to make something new for the baby ;). 

Four-year-old Miss Z's dress in the making:

I used the top of View C from this pattern because I think Z. looks particularly adorable in halter tops:

 



Instead of a tie at the neck that would get caught in hair, I cut off the straps and used snaps.

I cut out the waistband in the coral colored fabric from my older daughter's dress and added ties at the side seams of the waistband so that it would have a bow in the back and get a good snug fit on her teeny tiny little body.  (This will make sense in a minute when you see the rest of the pics.)

Voila! So serious, this girl.

Recognize the skirt?  Yes, yes, you are correct!  It is the bottom half of the dress I used to make Roo's dress that I showed you in the last post.

One dress before:

 

Two dresses after:

 



The wedding ceremony was outdoors on the most beautiful September day you could imagine and the girls had a glorious time.  Here are some pictures from the reception:

 

(Note the coral ties/bow I mentioned before.)

 

 

 

The girls and their cousins spent a great deal of time spitting into the water to attract fish!

 

 

If you are wondering about the fabric flower decorations, they were actually the inspiration for the revamped dresses. Originally I was just going to decorate the old flower girl dresses with bright fabric flowers but the more I played around with the coral and purple fabric, the more I wanted to use it in a big way.

What you do to make these fabric flowers is cut out circles of polyester fabric and burn the edges of the circles with a candle to make them curl (you could probably use something other than a candle?) and then stack the circles to create a petal look.  Search "DIY fabric flowers" online and you'll find all sorts of tutorials. (Honestly, I looked at the pics instead of reading any of them.)

 

I used a bit of Fray Check on the edges that didn't melt because, as we all know, taffeta lives to fray.

 

Since my older daughter's dress had to have a white zipper, I put a big flower in the center back to cover up the part where the purple waistband met the zipper.

 

 

 

Isn't it great how something relatively simple, like a flower made of fabric circles stacked on top of each other, can look so complicated and make such a big statement?

 

Fabric rocks.