Easter Dresses part 2

Here are some closer up pictures of the girls' Easter dresses:
They were all quite a bit of work so it was a good thing that I started when I did and that my mom was around to help out. My mom did a lot of the cutting out of the dress pieces (and a lot of it was done while she was watching my kids while I had to go to the Huntsman clinic). I found the fabric for all of the girls minus M&M while I was at the fabric store in the end of February buying the patterns. The problem with the dresses and fabric that I chose though is that there were basically 3 layers of everything! For Blondie, Kitty and Kay there was the overlay fabric, the main fabric and then the dress was lined from top to bottom. In addition to that they had a layer of tulle ruffle sewn to the bottom of the lining to add some body to the skirt. I modified things slightly here and there and I think they turned out beautiful! The overlay fabrics have flowers all over them which you can see best on the picture of Blondie's dress.
MJ's dress was the last one that I made. I had a different pattern for hers and I again modified it to get the look that I wanted. I bought the overlay for her dress at the same time as the other girls but ended up not buying quite enough of the main fabric of Kay's dress to make MJ's dress out of it. (I hadn't picked out or bought the pattern for MJ's dress yet when I bought the fabric). When I realized that I didn't have enough fabric, I went back to the store that I had originally bought it at and bought some more of the dark pink fabric. Well, when I pulled it out to show my mom so she could cut it out we discovered that it was not the same fabric! It was a little bit of a darker pink and was a little bit softer in feel. At first I tried going back to some fabric stores to see if I could find maybe a lighter shade of pink to use instead of one that was almost the same as Kay's, but not quite the same. Well, I wasn't able to find anything that I liked so I just used the darker fabric. I decided to just put the overlay fabric on the skirt of the dress and I designed a waistband and tie for the dress that I patterned after the dresses for the other girls. I put the overlay on the waistband as well and made the tie out of the overlay fabric. I couldn't find matching ribbon that was the right width for the dresses so I made the ties and waistbands out of fabric. The waistband and ties on the older girls' dresses were made from the main dress fabric without the overlay. MJ's dress was also lined so that added more sewing to the dress. (Just to give you an idea on the amount of sewing, all 4 of these dresses had 3 layers that had to be hemmed, the 3 older girls had a ruffle that was 144 inches wide and had to be gathered and then sewn onto the skirt lining and each of the dresses had a zipper! I ran through several spools of thread on these dresses!)

M&M was really excited to make this dress this year. I found a dress pattern in the misses section that I thought she might like and even though I knew the sizing was going to be a little bit big, I thought we could pull it off. We found this fabric at the store that M&M liked, the only problem was that she was concerned that it was a little see-through. So we decided to buy some lining and line the dress even though the pattern didn't call for it. It took a little bit of thinking on my part to figure out how to add the lining to the top of the dress because it was constructed very differently from other dress patterns that I have made. I was finally able to figure it out and I let M&M help on the parts that weren't too difficult. We were a little concerned that the dress was a little too low in the front and that M&M would be too self-conscious all day long always trying to adjust it so we decided to add some ribbon to the top to go along with the ribbon at the waistline. M&M was really pleased with the finished product and after a lot of driving around to shoe stores we found some cute shoes to go along with the dress!

All in all I think the dresses turned out beautifully and they were definitely some of the fancier dresses that I have done! And a lot more work than I have done in the past!!