okay, so I did get excited after all

Little girl dress!

Yeah, so my bit earlier today about maybe cutting out a baby dress tomorrow? The above is what happened. Not the book in the corner--I've just been re-reading that a lot lately. The dress.

I got the pattern from Made by Rae, which is a fantastic sewing blog. The dress is her Itty Bitty Baby Dress, which is one of her free patterns. I'm planning on buying her Washi Dress (which is sized for grown-ups) sometime in the next month, to make one for the summer, but this was a nice one to make in the meantime. The pattern just has one piece to print out and tape together, since the front and the back of the bodice are the same, and the skirt is made of two rectangles. It's not hard to put together, and the result makes me very happy. It's sized fairly small, although there is a second size available. Since it's looking like Munchkin will be on the small side, I went with the smaller version. August and September are usually quite warm here, so she should be able to wear it for maybe a month unless she grows really fast or we have a bout of wet weather.

The bodice of this dress is lined, so you get to turn it right-side out and poke the straps through (I used a chopstick). I'd never done piping before, so that was a new thing, and I love the way it looks around the waist. It's not quite as even as I would like, but it's good for a first try. I also decided to do French seams, another new-to-me technique. They're easy, and the finish is very satisfying. The waist isn't French-seamed, but I zig-zag stitched it after I took the gathering threads out to keep unravelling at a minimum.

Now that I've taken a picture, the dress is in the laundry basket. Everything in this dress is machine-washable, so Munchkin can drool all over it without there being too many consequences.

It strikes me that small items of clothing are good to practice new techniques on. Before I make the Washi Dress, I'll probably do a child's dress with shirring so I know what I'm doing. I also need to re-learn how to do buttonholes. I think it's been almost 15 years since I did buttonholes on the machine, and my grandma was supervising at the time. As she is several hundred miles away, and my webcam doesn't have the best focus, I'll have to do it on my own with the sewing machine manual at my side. If a buttonhole's a bit wonky, the baby won't mind like I would if it was my dress.

So, new plans for tomorrow: writing, going to the grocery store, and starting the baby sweater (but in the evening, so I get stuff done during the day).