From Bridesmaid Dress to Princess Dress

This project started a long time ago.  As in, the weather was so warm that I had the windows open and the girls were playing outside.  Crazy that that was only a few months ago.  

I happened to be walking through Savers when I came upon this bit of gold.

69 cents?  Seriously?  I just couldn't pass it up.  Even though, my girls may never be flower girls, I knew that they would love to have dresses like this.  What princess-loving, dress-up obsessed, little girl wouldn't?

The problem was that the over skirt alone calls for 6 yards of fabric and 6 yards of netting.  Yikes.  That would be 12 yards of satin material for my girls (just showing off my math skills).  That can get pricey quickly.

So I started brainstorming ways to make these for the girls on the cheap.  My mind went back to the christening gown I had made in the spring out of a friend's wedding gown.

Remember this one?

And then I thought of the 4 or 5 bridesmaid and prom dresses that I have just sitting upstairs in my closet.  Well, you can tell where this is going.  I took out those old dresses, cut them up and made my girls princess dresses for Christmas.

It was a bit of a challenge and there are some seams in weird places, but I figured since these are for play, it would be alright.

So these are what I started with.  The only one missing is  the silver skirt I used for E's underskirt.  That's because I (literally) took it out and finished E's dress last night.  At about 11:30.  So the picture-taking was not high on the priority list.  I was just happy to get it done. :)

The pictures are not the most amazing, but you get the idea.  I started with 3, long, formal gowns.

Then I cut them up.

The tricky part was fitting the pattern.  Like I said, I ended up with seams in weird places.  But I think it turned out alright in the end.

The underskirts were the easiest because I left the bottom hem in tact and just cut the skirt to the right length.  I hate hemming, so this was a major bonus for me!

3 of the dresses had a great lining.  The blue one had netting attached to the lining at the bottom.  I thought, "the poofier the better".  Right?  So I left the netting on the dark blue one and added some to the lining for E's silver skirt.

This is the lining for H's with the netting on the bottom.

And here is the underside of E's skirt.  Silver on the outside with a nice, bright red lining and some netting to add poof.

 Here's what was left of one dress after cutting it up.  I really tried to use as much of each dress as possible to minimize waste.

 The dark blue dress and silver skirt had a bit more left over, so I used them for the sashes.  I think the dresses look much better with the sashes on them, so I glad there was enough fabric!

The pattern called for a zipper at the back and a long sash that you tie in a bow.  Thinking about my girls playing independently, I decided to ditch the zipper (I hate putting in zippers anyhow) and put in easy open and close Velcro.  I also shortened the sashes so that they don't tie in the back, but simply close with Velcro with the rest of the back.

And here are the two finished dresses!
I really should have ironed them, but I was trying to take these pictures on the sly without the girls seeing.  So this is the best I could do.

I REALLY can't wait to see them in them!  I made them big so that, hopefully, they will fit into them for a few years yet.

After Christmas I will try to get some good pictures of them modeling their princess outfits.  Crowns, shoes and all.  We'll see if they will cooperate for me!

Salt Dough Hand Ornaments

I saw a post on Facebook recently.  It was directions to make your own salt dough ornaments.  The picture had a child's hand transformed into a Santa Claus.

VERY cute!  

But not exactly right for this family.  My control-freak self would have loved to take over this project and shoo the kids out of the room after they had made their cute little hand imprints.  Then this project would have looked the way I wanted it to.

Well, my 4 year old had some very specific ideas of her own and she knew what she wanted this ornament to look like.

Pink.

And sparkly.

I really should have seen that one coming.

After warring with said control-freak within me, I came to the conclusion that, in the end, this was HER project.  THE GIRLS were the ones giving these as gifts.

I love perfectly-made, cute, kid crafts, but I want my girls to know that their ideas are valuable, what they make is beautiful (and age appropriate), and their gifts are heart-felt and meaningful - not mommy-dictated and impersonal.

Anyways, I let both girls choose what they wanted to do.  Of course, the younger one copied the older, but that's ok. She's 2.

So...here's the recipe I found online.  I doubled it and wrote down the doubled proportions.  So you can get 4, toddler-sized hands out of this.

Ingredients
1 cup flour
1 cup salt
1/2 cup water

Method
Mix the salt and flour together.  Add the water and knead with your hands until it forms a stiff dough.


Easy, eh?  I don't think I've ever used so much salt in a recipe in my life.  I guess that's why it's called SALT dough.

I broke the dough into 4 equal parts and pounded each flat.  The girls then made impressions of their hands in the dough (2 each).

I used a sharp knife to trim around each impression and to make a hole at the top.  Our "top" was actually the bottom of their hands or the palm.

The impressions were arranged on a greased cookie sheet.

The oven was set.

And then they baked.

And baked.

And baked.

For 3 hours.

Once they were done (and hard as rock), they were set to cool for a bit.

Then we broke out the paint.  E insisted on pink (as I said earlier) and H wanted orange.  I had red, white, and yellow in the basement so I attempted to make my own pink and orange.

I ended up with red that was slightly pink and red that was slightly orange.

Dried, they look like the same color - red.  The kids didn't seem to mind, though.  Phew!

 I kept suggesting design ideas. You know...polka dots, stripes.  Nothing doing.  These hands were going to be PINK and SPARKLED.

At least she knows what she wants. :)

Once they were painted, I stepped in and traced the outline of each hand.

Then I flipped them over and wrote their names and the dates on the backs.

Now it was time to add the sparkle.

We took out the handy-dandy Mod Podge sparkle and liberally applied it to the fronts and then the backs of the hands.

This added shine, sparkles, and, conveniently, sealed the dough so that the ornaments would last longer.

The ornaments dried overnight. 

A ribbon was thread through the hole at the top to complete.

Ooooooo....ahhhhh...

Nice job, girls!  Gifts for the grandparents, hand-made by the kids.

Love it!

From Daddy's Old Shirts to Christmas Dresses

A while back, a few of my friends posted a picture of a little girl's dress made out of an old shirt.  I really thought that I would log that away until I had more time...like next year.  But then, the idea stuck in my head.

Coincidentally, my husband was cleaning out his closet and was going to throw a few white shirts out because they were a bit grungy or stained.  So I thought, eh, why not?

So here are the results of my destroying two old shirts to make two new (and hopefully cute) Christmas dresses for my girls.

Here is one of the shirts I started with:

Before cutting up the shirt, I took a look at how some other moms did it.  While my dresses are based on a tutorial I found over at MADE (http://www.danamadeit.com/2008/07/tutorial-the-shirt-dress.html), I have embellished and changed things up a bit.  Mainly because these are winter dresses - not summer - and because I wanted to.

So...remember that pattern I JUST used for the girls' Christmas pajamas?  Well, here it is again.

For this project I used the long shirt you see on the right.  I lengthened both the shirt and the sleeves to make a long-sleeved dress.  However, the main part of the bodice was kept in tact.

So here's the pattern laid out on the shirt.

Instead of folding the shirt in half, I cut out one side and then flipped the pattern over to the cut out the other half of the dress.  I did this mainly because I couldn't get the shirt to lie flat with the buttons in the middle.

As you can see, I left the bottom portion of the shirt uncut as I wanted to adjust the length for each daughter individually.

Next, I cut off the sleeves of the shirt.    The sleeves on this one were particularly stained, so I had to be careful what part I used.  I'm not sure what my husband did to them, but they were not pretty.

Anyways, because of the staining, I decided to use a contrast fabric for the actual sleeve and the shirt for a ruffled cuff.

Sorry I didn't take pics of this, but I used the pattern piece for  the sleeves and cut them out of the contrast fabric.  To get the correct length for the sleeves, I measure each girl's arm.

For the ruffled cuff at the bottom of the sleeve, I measured the width of the sleeve at the wrist and cut the cuff to that length.

I made a casing and inserted elastic in between the cuff and the main body of the sleeve to really give it that ruffled look.

The waistband is a strip of contrast fabric folded in half and sewn on top of the shirt.  I made 2 elastic casings and inserted 1/4" elastic into the casings.  The elastic was cut to 1" longer than the measurement of the girls' waists.

The last thing I put on was the contrast ruffle at the bottom.  I measured each girl and cut the shirt straight across so that the shirt ended at the knees.  Then, I cut 2 ruffle pieces that were double the width of the dress by 6 1/2".

I hemmed the bottom first, then gathered the top of the ruffle with a gathering stitch.  It was sewn on to the main body of the dress and presto!  A ruffle.

For a more finished look, I top stitched at the shirt/ruffle seam and added a double-stitched hem at the bottom.

And here's the finished product!  H's is a 2T and E's a 4T.

The one thing I did NOT see coming (I'm not sure why, guess I didn't think about it), was that the dresses are a bit see-through.  This is why men should wear undershirts, right? :)

So, after the dresses were finished I decided to make slips to go underneath.  I could have made attached slips, but since the elastic was already in the waist, that seemed a bit to difficult.  Besides, a detached slip can be used with other dresses as well.

Lucky for me, I had extra white lining fabric sitting at the bottom of my fabric stash.  Sweet.

I took out the trusty pattern again and used the top for a basic A-line skirt.  I folded down the bodice portion of the pattern and only used the bottom.

Since these are just slips, they did\n't need to be that long.  I only really wanted them to be under the white shirt part of the dress, not necessarily the ruffle.

I cut a front and a back for each slip and sewed the side seams.

Here they are with the side seams sewn (not that you can see it in the picture).

And here's my little "helper".

Next it was off to the ironing board.  I pressed and pinned a narrow hem at the bottom and pressed and pinned an elastic casing at the top.

Then it was back to the machine, sew the hem, and sew the casing while making sure to leave a space open for the elastic to go through.

Again, I cut the elastic to 1" longer than the girls' waist measurements. 

I only had 1/2" elastic left, but I would have used 1/4" if I had my choice.

Then I sewed the two ends of the elastic together and closed up the opening in the casing.

And there's my easy-peasy slip.

Phew!  Done!

Well? What do you think?  Are they ready for Christmas?