Another dress

I found another awesome tutorial for a cute dress/blouse. This one is located at Kuky Ideas here.

It is a shirred dress/blouse. Shirring is a neat method of using elastic thread and making a normally unstretchable fabric stretchy. It is very intimidating and takes a lot of trial and error. It was very hard to find the right tension and I still didn't find the right tension after working at it all evening.

Anyway, Scott left town to hang out with friends, so after the kids went down for bed I pulled out my sewing machine and went to work. I worked from about 8:30 until 11:00pm. So, it took me about two and half hours to figure out how to shirr and put the thing together.

Well, here's what I ended up with. It isn't perfect. It is probably too big for my daughter (better too big than too small. My lines aren't straight. I am still unsure about strap (right now it is just two straps sewn to the front - probably going to tie it around the neck for now). I am, however, quite pleased that I was able to figure this out by online tutorials. Besides Kuky Ideas, I found a tutorial on shirring at Portabellopixie (scroll down and in the right sidebar find tutorials - it is a pdf file so you'll need Adobe Acrobat reader - it is an awesome tutorial with plenty of pictures).

Anyway, here's my finished project (I still have to get pics of the girlie in the green dress I made last week - hopefully tomorrow):

I can't wait to make my next dress for the girlie! This is so much fun and a bit addicting.