edelweiss dress blog tour

It's my turn on the Hey June pattern tour!

Adrianna, one of the brains behind the crafterhours

blog surprised me with an invite to the blog tour for her new Edelweiss dress pattern

The Edelweiss is a simple, yet interesting dress design featuring ruffle straps that extend down the bodice, with options for a tunic length and a pieced front bodice.

 

 

One thing that struck me about the pattern as I browsed through it was that there are no subliminal sewing instructions. You don't have to read between the lines. Which is great for sewing beginners, or for novices like me who got dropped on their head as a baby next to one of pig statues in Pike Place market in Seattle. That space between the lines of instructions is pretty invisible to me. 

Another thing I appreciated was that she tells you which pages you really need to print based on the size you're sewing, and dimensions for the skirt pieces if you don't want to bother printing out huge rectangles.

 

 

Aside from the obvious funness of the lederhosen-esque straps down the front, I really love the back of the dress. 

Through different seasons I have design elements that make me happy, and it so happens that right now one of them is the low cut strappy button back.

 

Contrary to my usual methods of fraken-sizing things for my skinny and tall 4 year old, I decided to be lazy and just do the 4T. Because I was able to resize the bodice by hyper-overlapping the back of the bodice before putting in buttons, it ended up working out fine. It's a bit big across the chest for her, but she usually runs about 18m-2T in chest size so I was expecting that. 

  And because of her narrow shoulders, I followed the advice in the pattern about the option of not sewing them into the back of the bodice right away, and instead fitting the straps after you've made the rest of the dress. I've had enough things come out with straps that will. not. stay. up. that my lesson has been learned. So the straps fit great. 

Our photo shoot was pretty short and, um....not sweet.....perturbed? So though you can't tell from the really cheerful shots of my Clover, she absolutely LOVES this dress. Which is a big deal because she is becoming notoriously eccentric and erratic in her clothes preferences. You really never know with her. 

She originally rejected the idea of the polka dots because the dots were black and "not beautiful, and not my favorite color." But after playing musical chairs with various fabrics on my sewing table for a while I decided that nothing looked better than the dots.

 

Other fabrics used were this really soft, silky and fluttery rayon that I found at Jo-Ann's. It's got a subtle floral, but not too busy or loud. And Clover adores how it moves....

 

She swished, twirled, danced, and played around in her dress for 4 straight days before I snuck it into the laundry basket. A shrill shriek of "Where's my pretty dress!" was like music to my ears. 

Because it was so sheer I decided to use all the leftovers I could to make a second skirt layer - an accidental source of awesome points from Clover. 

The under skirt is just serged off because it was much shorter than the over skirt. How about those darn adorable chicken legs under there? 

And the winner of the last musical chairs - er -fabric spot on this dress was the mustard yellow kona cotton, which I had nearby from working on the never ending quilt project I have going. My first plan was to use the skirt fabric as the straps too, but I was worried that the rayon would make a sad looking ruffle. 

The combination of the fabrics on this dress creates some sort of visual flavor harmony that my eyes just love. Does that make any sense? She looks like a little German ballerina, which seems to make her a happy little girl.   

All in all, this was a total success, and I'm so grateful to Adrianna for asking me to join in! If you like the pattern you can check it out here in her pattern shop. And there are more blog tour posts coming up on the crafterhours blog.