Sunday, April 15, 2012

Abbey Dress

I have what seems like a million friends currently expecting, most with girls. I thought I'd get a head start on sewing gifts. Living quite far from any stores that sell patterns, I looked online for something free.


I found this dress pattern via Pinterest, it's free and is called The Abbey Dress. This purple one is the first one I made... some of the instructions and pattern pieces on the original post weren't quite so clear so I kind of plowed through it and attempted to do my best at figuring out what was what. The dress originally ended up looking quite short, so I added an underlayer with a white fabric trimmed in the ruffled purple fabric at the bottom.  I used piping like the original blogger, but found it quite finicky to work with. 

I wanted to make some sort of a label, and this morning recalled that somewhere I had a fabric marker.   I used some letter stamps and ribbon, and voila!   I think it turned out quite nice. 

A close-up of the back of the dress.   I'm not fantastically crazy about the closure on this dress pattern, and ended up muddling the piping a bit on the lower portion there (used a zigzag stitch to save it).

Once you figure out how to correctly draw and measure the bodice piece from the original  post, and sew through the pattern once, it's pretty easy to then again replicate.  I don't have a baby around to try this on, so I'm not sure how great a fit it is.   The original post says it should fit a newborn as a dress, through to a one-year old as a shirt.  The dress can be made with a fat quarter (18"x21") if you use another fabric as the bodice lining (I have done this several times with using a plain white or tan cotton lining).

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