My Creative Space - Um, Bandwagon, room for one more?

I thought I'd join in with Kootooyoo's Creative Spaces this week because I just couldn't resist jumping on the man's shirt to toddler dress refashion bandwagon. (One of my personal favourites on this theme was the hilarious "How to turn a toddler's dress into a man's shirt" posted on April 1st. annoyingly I can't now find it, and Google isn't helping)

So here's my version, for which I won't provide a tutorial because there are about 70,000 results from Google if you look. Besides which I don't do the "lay a dress which fits your toddler on top of the dress and cut around it" style of sewing. I'm a pattern maker. Not a proper one (a patternmaker, with no space between the words), but I learnt the principles as part of my degree and continue to learn all I can from books and the internet (check out Sherry's blog for some brilliant tutorials). I drafted a pattern for an A line dress in a size three (so it should fit Isabella better this summer, when she'll be over 2 and a half) and made this.

I'd started with this. David doesn't wear short sleeved shirts, so when his brother was having a clean out I swiped it.


To maximize available fabric I unpicked the (flat-felled) side seams.

And squeezed my pattern pieces on. I had to unpick a bit of the armhole seam as well to get it to fit.

Here's a reminder of how I manage my turn of cloth allowance for collars. Sherry shows how to do it properly at the pattern stage. I've folded the collar and pinned the lower edge and now I'm sewing within the seam allowance to secure it before attaching it to the neckline. You can just see how the underneath layer is peeking out.

Also on my desk today are these trees, freezer paper stencilled. I really really really love silhouettes of bare trees.

And my friends have been giving me stick for not mentioning my dress. I wore it out to dinner for one friend's birthday last weekend. Where it was much admired and I felt a million bucks. (I even ran into my BIL who told me I looked fantastic.) I realised that it wasn't the dress that left me feeling Meh, it was the grey and dismal winter we've been having! So Keely, J, M, H and other J, there you go. I mentioned it.