Orange Dress
My poor daughter has had to run around in t-tunics for the past year or so, and it's time for me to correct that. I've got lots of little 2-yard bits of brocades that I bought years and years ago with the famous last words "I can make a bodice/doublet out of that!" Looking back, how often have I ever done that? Just about never. This should be a good way to clear them out. This is a simple dress of fairly generic design. I used machine-sewn buttonholes for lacing holes; not pretty, but not really ugly either. The bodice straps hav an extra three or four inches that can be let out, and I put a half inch tuck in the back to allow for some expansion there. The skirt is a pleated cylinder. It isn't the most exciting shape, but it makes it very easy to add a band to the bottom that can be replaced to allow for growth and/or destruction. I also used this dress to experiment with a techinque for attaching a pleated skirt that was pointed out to me recently. Rather than simply machine sewing the skirt to the bodice (which leaves a pretty bulky seam at the waist, especially with heavier fabrics like this), I finished the bottom edge of the bodice and whip stitched the top edge of the pleats to the very bottom edge of the bodice. It isn't very labor intensive, and it seems to work well.
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