I love sewing with patterns, I think the fit you can achieve is superb, but I very rarely follow any pattern exactly. It’s kind of like myself and cooking, I can’t stick to a recipe to save my life, I always have to make it my own. I guess it’s my own way of using my creativity with the help of inspiration. That doesn’t work so well with baking, but it ends up being pretty fun with cooking and sewing!
Pillowcase dresses are great for little girls. They are perfect for summer, they can be layered in fall/winter, they become a top once they outgrow them as a dress, they take no time to make and the possibilities are endless. I thought it would be fun to change up your basic pillowcase dress. There are a gazillion tutorials online for pillowcase dresses (such as here, here, and here) and they are the perfect beginner sewing project. The pillowcase dress is a wonderful pattern to make your own and is great to experiment with because the fit is so forgiving.
For this pillowcase dress, I used only fat quarters of six different fabrics. These are some fat quarters that I picked up at quilt market – “Little Apples” by Aneela Hoey (this fabric will be released in September 2011). I decided to piece together the main part of the dress with three different prints. I did this by simply sewing strips of fat quarters together so that the piece was large enough to accommodate the pattern. Once large enough, I cut my pattern out.
I added two layered pieces of fabric to the top of the dress in the front and the back. These pieces were cut 5″ and 4″, but were both the same width as the top of the dress. I stitched them to the top of the main dress pattern piece before folding it over to make the casing. They actually aren’t ruffled, they just look that way because of the way the neck-line is gathered. Pretty cute, huh?
Fat quarters are only so long, so to extend the dress, I cut a fat quarter into four equal parts, sewed it in a long strip and made it into a ruffle at the bottom of the dress. If you wanted to make it even longer, you could do several tiered ruffles which would be really fun.
I used polka dot bias tape to trim the arm holes and threaded a red (with white stitching) ribbon through the neckline. You could also thread two ribbons and have the dress tie at both shoulders.
Lindsay Wilkes is the owner and designer behind The Cottage Mama. She creates timeless, vintage inspired sewing patterns for children’s clothes. She is also a fabric designer for Riley Black Designers / Penny Rose Fabrics, author of the book ‘Sew Classic Clothes for Girls’ and can be seen teaching nationwide and online in her video series ‘Lessons with Lindsay’ sponsored by Baby Lock Sewing and Embroidery machines.
