dress #3





I finished dress #3 last week, and it has so many mistakes that it barely qualifies as a "dress."  In fact, my friend Jillian laughed when I showed it to her.  Seriously.  (Love you, Jill! :-)  As with anything in life, there are Pros and Things I Learned.

Pros:

• This looks like a dress.
• It fits the crazy toddler.
• It has sleeves and a zipper.
• There are no pins still stuck in it that would stick the crazy toddler.
• The fabric is cute.
• Um...

Things I Learned:

• Sometimes it's better not to follow pattern directions exactly.  The contrast band on the hem is all jacked up (as in I had to fold the excess fabric into a random pleat as I sewed the band on to the bottom of the dress), but I used my own method to keep the same problem from occurring on the sleeves.
• I know what "stitch in the ditch" means now.  That doesn't mean I know how to do it.
• You don't have to use a zipper foot to sew in a zipper.  I still don't know what a zipper foot is or if I even have one.
• I still need to figure out how to get my machine to do a gathering stitch.  Please don't look too closely at my uneven gathers...
• I am brushing up on my visual/spatial skills from staring intently at the pictures on the pattern directions.
• My sewing skills do not improve very much after a glass of wine.

In spite of its flaws and imperfections, I am really proud of this dress.  I made it all by myself!  It's my first step towards ACTUALLY SEWING CUTE THINGS, and I don't think Cara really cares if it's not perfect.  All she cares about is whether or not she can run in it.