Been meaning to blog about these little dresses a while now. I was planning to do so during Easter break, but the nice weather got a little in the way and I was also in an awesome mood to sew!  (And maybe a bit of laziness might have been involved as well to be honest).

While in the office for a team meeting, I expressed my desire to make a little gift for the daughter of  one of my colleagues. She said it would be nice. And since I have two colleagues with little girls, I decided to make a dress for each of them. Made one for a 4 year old and one for a 2 year old.

I chose to make the dress pattern that came with the issue 68 of Sew Magazine, and is a dress from Sue Kim’s book – Boutique Casual.   If you want to make it as well, check their website the patters is available to download. 

This should be no surprise to you that I used fabric I  bought at Abakhan’s  while on a day out in Manchester. I thought this Hershey’s Kisses  on pink would be the best choice for a little girl’s dress. I  wanted to  use some contrast for the sleeve binding and collar. Pink would have been to light, so I decided that brown would be just perfect.

The instructions are pretty easy to follow, but as usual I did my own thing. You know, sometimes we get carried away and go with the flow, in this case the stitch. because I wanted my seams to  be enclosed, especially for the sleeves, I have changed the instructions a little and added the sleeves in such as way that the seam is sandwiched between the shell fabric and yoke ( a little had stitching was required. for the skirt part, I did a French seam.  

For one of the dresses I used my funky embroidery stitch on my Singer machine! Why have  all those stitches on your machine and never use them, so this was a good opportunity to use one.

I have been told that one of the girls when was given the dress and  was told it was a present, she hugged the dress! Isn’t that cute? That’s why I love making gifts for the little ones ever so often!

If you  sew for the  little one, what is your motivation?  I would love to hear your thoughts on this.