Bee Dresses

Here’s my annual outfits-for-the-girls project! The fabric for the dresses is a silk jacquard from the silk mill in Sudbury. The right side is blue with pink bees; the wrong side is the opposite. But you have to look pretty closely to tell that the pink is the wrong side, so I decided to ignore right and wrong side. The fabric for the capes is a cotton velveteen home dec fabric. The velvet is extremely cushy; it’s almost a faux fur.

I have about 1.5 yds of the bee fabric left. I’m thinking about a ball skirt for me. I’ve always wanted a ball skirt.

Josephine’s dress (the smaller one) is from BWOF 3/2009. The pattern is for a shirt, but I just made it a bit longer and added pockets to make a dress. Pascale’s dress is from Girly Style Wardrobe. She currently measures exactly 110 cm, so I decided to make the dress in size 120. I’m not sure that was the right decision. It’s rather large on her. The capes are from Ottobre fall 08.

Girly Style, the book that the larger dress pattern came from

The Girly Style pattern that I chose

Pascale modeling the ensemble.

Josephine’s dress. She was cranky and did not want to pose.

Josephine’s cape

The front of Pascale’s dress

The back of Pascale’s dress

Pascale’s dress on the hanger.

Katherina asked this question on my bias trim post:
But i still do not know what the advantage of adding two layers of trim extra and using wider stripes might be. Can you tell me, why you are using this method?
It’s a good question. My gut reaction is, “That’s how I was taught.” This is not a bad answer, as I studied couture at FIT. But not a good answer either. It’s hard to explain why I think this is the right way, even though you wind up with 2 extra layers. I think the main reason is, if you are using the 4-layer method, you have to press the bias to get the fold to stay while you’re hand-stitching. It’s almost impossible to press bias without stretching it, and once it’s stretched, you’ll never get it to mold around the curves properly. With my method, there’s no pressing involved, so it’s easy to mold the bias by hand around the curves while you’re stitching. If you do your bias binding as I’ve described, it’s pretty hard to mess it up, even if you’re really not paying attention.

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