Remember in my
Grinchy post when I mentioned that the candy-cane binding wasn't *all* we picked up at my
local quilt shop? Yeah. I gotta say, previous visits to the quilt shop with my daughter had been a
little touch-and-go due to my daughter's attention span, but this time she was
all in. We spent a good 45 minutes in the store, and she found tons of stuff to admire. But most of all, she found this unanticipated gem:
Sleeping Beauty character fabric. Aurora is my daughter's favorite Disney princess, and she was desperate not to leave the store without some. I was a little more leery (I'm trying to work through stash, not add to it), but in the end I decided that if I wanted to cultivate her love of quilt-store trips, I needed to be prepared to bring some fabric home now and then. So in our bag it went.
I tried to find a project that would put a dent in my sizeable knit stash after the Grinch dress, I really did. But somehow this fabric was staring at me, my newly-acquired serger was staring at me, and fresh off my trip to the quilt store, I was REALLY tempted to go ahead and sew another woven pattern for curiosity's sake. I already had the
Ginger and the
Ginger Misses from a
Violette Field Threads 4th of July sale, and if I wanted more woven patterns, I needed to prove to myself that I would actually make them. So...
Despite the dubious wisdom of making a halter-top dress in winter, off I went. The Ginger is elastic-backed, and it wasn't TOO hard to add extra 1/2" to the bodice and the skirt length, so I'm hopeful that even though I made it mid-winter, it will still fit this spring and summer.
This was my first VFT pattern, and after this, I am sure there will be others. The VFT Ginger tutorial was VERY well put together - well documented, lots of words, clear pictures with labels and stitch line marked where needed. I did find two mistakes in the pattern (slightly picky ones) but when I emailed the design team at VFT, they were corrected promptly.
And the result speaks for itself! A classic Marilyn Monroe style that my daughter can't help but pose in, in the perfect shade of pink and with her favorite princess...
No wonder she's got a big smile on her face!
