The easter dress(es)

So, it all started last August with a gift from the "knitting gods" as my friend puts it. I had lamented to a friend at church about how expensive nice yarn is, but how much nicer it is for knitting. Later that week I came home to 9 skeins of baby bubble gum pink Rowan yarn at my back door (not it's official color, I forget what it is now). A very generous lady had overheard the conversation and left me the gift.

Now that I had the yarn I poured over my knitting books and couldn't find exactly what I was picturing. I found this dress below that I liked, but I wanted more of a sweater so I took the basic idea and turned it into a cardigan with extra ruffles which created way more knitting than I anticipated.
Below is the "pattern" as it evolved from what I sketched out and all the math I did to try and get it right, I started with just a musing on one of Joachim's coloring printouts and then this eel became my inseparable reference.
I'd hoped to finish it for Christmas, but I was knitting hundreds of stitches a row and it was taking forever. I should have trusted the original gauge I estimated because it wraps too far around her. And, by the time it was finished she had grown quite a bit in length. Anyway, I hurried up and finished it for Easter and started dreaming of a little dress.

While visiting my parents, I bought one fabric I thought I liked, but it ended up looking to bold? sixties? I don't know what, so I called my mom and asked her to go back and buy another one I'd liked but passed up. Lucky me, it was on sale and she bought the rest of the bolt and I am cherishing it for all sorts of projects. Here is dress #1.
I had already bought a Simplicity pattern and started making the above dress with the ugly fabric. Silly me, I've never actually followed a pattern so I don't know why I thought I needed this one. As a flaw in the design it zips up the side armhole like an adult dress rather than the neck like a normal baby dress. As such, the neck hole needs to be large enough to fit the whole baby head, which in Anna's case meant that her shoulders also slipped through the hole because she's so narrow (with a big noggin).

I then scrapped the pattern, sewed up the zipper seam and studied the buttons on the back of a dress that already fit her. I'm pleased with myself for figuring it out, but then with the back buttoning, the front was too loose so I pleated it and the dress ended up quite cute, although I still don't care for the fabric
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At about the same time my new fabric arrived in the mail I read a SouleMama entry where she said she was never any good at following patterns and always had better results following her gut and winging it. That's my general experience, not that patterns are bad, I'm just usually frustrated with them, (although there are some really gifted moms out there writing books with very usable patterns). So, with her affirmation of my gut I embarked on dress #2.

For this dress I sketched out a bunch of ideas I liked in my imagination and then narrowed them down to the ones feasible for my available time and which would suit the fabric I picked.Photobucket" border="0">
I stumbled on a tutorial for making mock smocking and I fell in love with it. I have no idea what the link is, but I know I found it in one of Amanda Soule's archived entries. It's so easy it's crazy and that's where I started with the dress. Joachim and I sat at the sewing machine during one of Anna's naps and we sewed line after line after line with the elastic. He's an expert at sewing straight lines, and lifting and lowering the foot.

Too bad it rained the entire Easter day and it was too cold for the dress, even with the sweater and since then, it's been to hot to wear the dress with the sweater. A bit disappointing after hours and hours of work, but they were all lessons learned and I'm not giving up on the handmade items, although I am taking a break for the summer and I'm sticking to very simple ideas for the future. I've realized just because I might be capable of actualizing an idea, it doesn't mean I should invest the time in it. A hard lesson for me because I can become driven, maybe obsessed, with an idea at the expense of other important things (people).
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