The Last Minute Post...

So a while back on the 18th of October, I made these two dresses for Maya. One sports the kanji of her middle name (Ai = love), and the other is made from a formerly boxy school spirit shirt, and some awesome owl fabric from JoAnn's. (Which is very fitting since the school's mascot is "Oakie" the Owl.)

Around that same time I was lucky enough to be chosen by the fates/karma/good luck to be the new mama of Serena (by Apple Treehouse). Maya immediately wanted to make a new outfit for her. I let her pick through the LBB scrap pile and she came up with this number:

Too Cute!

Then I started working on my swap dress.

Unfortunately, I had a few issues. The shirt

that was JUST perfect was a little too small to

work with a sz 5 Sienna, so I pieced the main design together with some coordinating fabric to widen it for the dress. Then after I had the rest of the dress cut (more of the coordinating, and some of this absolutely lovely plaid that I can't wait to a

dd to more dresses), I realized that I had never really worked with a hood let alone combined patterns before... Sooooo with that knowledge in mind, I put the swap dress on hold until I could practice adding a hood to the Sienna dress pattern. Sooo with the help of the fabulous directions directions Ashley provides and the combining patterns tutorial I made a hooded I heart NY dress. I unfortunately appear to have never actually posted a photo of this (will look on my other computer tomorrow). It was a really cute dress - worst case I'll see if I can get my cousin to send me a pic of it...

Anyway, I got a little side tracked and went

ahead with another asymmetrical dress with Stephanie Corfee's Astrid Garden fabric off of Spoonflower. I

LOVE this dress. This is probably my favourite out of everything I've sewn since I started following LBB and using the LBB patterns! Maya loved this dress too. She asked me to make Serena one as well...

Using the basic LBB doll dress pattern, I lengthened the sleeve, and surprisingly it worked to make a long sleeve for the doll. I didn't actually have Serena on hand to test out the dress pattern until after I had already sewn the dress. Maya and I were only too happy to find that it

worked!

Next it was back to the dress swap dress. I figured I had lallygagged enough! So now that I had the hood down, I cut my sleeve and hood fabric (and hood trimming), and started piecing the dress together. I love the way this dress came out! I can't wait to see photos posted of the swap dress being worn by its proud new owner! (And Maya rightfully points out that I've given away all the hoodie dresses I've made this month, so she says the next one I make is hers).

By now I was in sewing crunch time because I also needed to get Maya's Halloween costume out the door. I had never worked with a more regular sleeve pattern before (I'd mostly just sewn the raglan style used in the Sienna as opposed to the more regular sleeve used in the hoodie pattern), however when I looked at pictures of Maya's chosen character, they were pretty clear as to the style of sleeve... again, luckily for me I was working off of the LBB hoodie pattern and I had plenty of great photos and clear instructions to follow. And the hoodie pattern combined with the Sienna method of lengthening became Daphne from Scooby Doo!