Tale of THE Dress

There once was a girl who gave her mom two pictures, one of a black dress and one of a white dress.
The girl asked her mom, “Mom, can you make me a dress that looks like these?”
The Mom said, “Uh, both of them?”
The girl said, “I’d like it to be black….but have red on it.”
So the mom looked in her stash of fabric and lo and behold there was some black fabric (leftover from making flags for when the girl was in Color Guard) and some red fabric (leftover from the girl’s Can-Can outfit four Halloweens ago) and some satin black paisley fabric (leftover from the girl’s pirate outfit from six Halloweens ago) and a few odds and ends of lace and trimmings. All the mom had to buy were the buttons; heart shaped buttons, for the back because the mom refused to do zippers if she could get away with it.
Soon the mom got all her stuff together and then proceeded to set it aside for a week, then another week and another and then she made a quilt, then another quilt and…well….you get the picture, she procrastinated and the next thing she knew it was five days before Halloween.
So the Monday before, she fixed herself…..a hot cocoa (bet you thought I was going to say a drink!)….looked at her piles of fabric and started cutting out the dress. The problem was she didn’t have a pattern, just the pictures. So the mom took a pattern that sort of looked like the dress (from her stash of many, many costume and dress patterns) and went to work.
She lowered the back and the front and added ten inches to the sides of the front and the back of the skirt to make it fuller. The mom made some templates out of cardstock for the card suites and cut them out, ironed on double-sided fusible webbing, then ironed them on to the skirt and did some machine appliquéing for the first time ever! (Getting ready for Round 4 Circle quilts for the ORBC Quilt-Along) She made some double fold bias tape out of the satiny paisley fabric (which is a bear to iron) for the trim and bows out of the paisley and red satin and next thing she knew the Deck of Cards Lolita Dress was born!
All this sewing didn’t take place in one day, no, the mom made the whole top one day and the whole bottom the next and on the third day (after multiple cups of tea and cocoa) the girl was able to try it on and never was there a happier young lady!

So with a little extra red fabric and trim the mom made an underskirt and the girl found her top hat, black netting stockings, black shoes and necklace and she was ready for the ball…um…Halloween! And the mom….she put something stiffer in her tea, put her feet up and tried not to think about what the girl was going to ask her to make next Halloween!!

Hope you all had a wonderful Halloween and are enjoying the change of the seasons be it Spring or Fall!:)

~d

PS. If you want to see some of the other things the mom has sewn for the girl see her Flickr page...

http//www.flickr.com/photos/29893965@N08/sets/72157622613879034/