weekend sewing indeed

Instead of tackling the aforementioned list of to-do's I sewed Saturday afternoon, evening and a little this evening. Eva picked out some material for me for Mother's Day. It is not my style, polyester, purple with flowers. She immediately asked me to make her something. The only clothes I've sewed was her Halloween costume. I looked through all my new sewing books and decided to make the Flower Girl Dress from Weekend Sewing by Heather Ross. I kept delaying the project, realizing that the material was the problem, not mention it'd be too hot to even wear this summer in humid Virginia. I took the children to Discount Fabric a few weeks ago and I got some cute Heather Baily fabric on clearance (great coordinating polka dot and striped.) I told Eva on Friday that was what I was going to make her dress out of, unlike her, she did not question me. The pattern from the book only went up to a size 4 and Eva is a 6/7 at least. I took tracing paper and decided to just enlarge it, knowing this is not recommended for beginner sewers but I did not want to pay for a new pattern when I had this one here. It took a few iterations to get what I thought to be the right size. When I held the Baily fabric in my hand, I realized, discounted or not, I'm not going to cut in to this when I do not know if the pattern will work. So, Eva is getting two dresses, the first one made from the purple material. The material posed many of the challenges and I made several errors reading the pattern but here is the dress for me to fit the straps and hem on Eva tomorrow, and indeed it was a weekend project, even for a beginner. Hopefully I'll get the other one together quickly for our trip in less then two weeks.