So, there I am, sitting with a stack of fabrics and thinking about making my kids some capes. “They’ll love it!”, I think. “What kid doesn’t love a dress-up cape?”
Down comes my daughter, and I ask her if she would like a cape.
“No thank you.”
Hrmph. But she saw the fabric I had pulled, and had other ideas.
“Would you make me a butterfly shirt?
Oh dear. A shirt? Hrm. I started looking for simple tutorials, and happened instead upon some skirt tutorials. I asked Becca if a butterfly skirt would be OK.
“No. I want a butterfly dress.”
Right. Well. Um… OK. It’s not as though I have sewing patterns hanging around my house, and I didn’t want this to turn into a big trip to Joann’s. I needed something quick and easy, and ended up finding this tutorial. Easy enough, and only one technique (gathering) that I had never done before.
An hour and a half later, we had a passable butterfly dress.
The butterfly fabric in question is from the sadly-out-of-print Wonderland by MoMo. The trim is Kona Aqua. The tutorial is made with a border-print fabric in mind, but I ended up adding the hem border, which I did a little channel stitching just for fun. I didn’t take the extra border into account for the extra length, though, so the dress ended up being quite long. Oh well.
I used this tutorial to take a little bit of the annoyance out of making bias tape – definitely a nice trick and resulted in me being much less likely to burn my fingers as I attempt to hold the fabric and iron at the same time.
It’s far from perfect, and I didn’t even bother to pre-wash the fabric (gasp!). But in less than two hours, I had a satisfied almost-four-year-old, so I’m calling it a win.
