Florals Month at PR&P

I’ve learned something about myself . And I’m not impressed. I’ve learned that when given lots of time to complete a project, I will probably waste it away. Give me 2 days and I will meet the challenge. But I don’t like that! I like relaxed sewing! Why do I waste the relaxed sewing time and wait till the last minute to do a stress sew????

This month Project Run and Play gave a whole month to sew up an outfit with the theme of “Florals”. I breathed in a sigh of relief at so much time to put something together….. It’s now 13 hrs left to enter and wouldn’t you know, I’m stuck. I started an outfit yesterday and went to bed feeling very confident that the last few things to finish would come along great this morning. Not so. I sat down this morning and realized I have made 2 cutting mistakes that, though able to be fixed (in a hack-job sort of manner), I won’t have time to do it before deadline. I’m 50% upset that I’ve messed this up and 50% that I can’t put this into the contest!

BUT!!! Then I remembered I have a pretty sweet dress that is definitely “Floral” inspired that I can enter!! The pattern is the Mia Dress by Simple Life Pattern Company and the fabric is Art Gallery (of course) from the Wonderful Things collection by Bonnie Christine. This skirt fabric is up there pretty high on my list of favourite fabrics.

I started making this dress before Spring Break in hopes of taking it to Cuba with us and doing a fun photo shoot. Except I realized as I was cutting that I was not going to have near enough fabric for it. My daughter is taller than I thought….

I started making adjustments and changes in hopes that I could make it work. So I pulled out this bodice fabric from my stash and figured that was one place I could save fabric. I wanted to be able to tie it in with the skirt fabric though so I went looking for an embroidery option and found this that I embroidered onto the top. I thought it was a pretty close match and I do love how it came together.

Unfortunately, that was not enough to save the fabric and I had to order more. So much for taking the dress to Cuba. It ended up on hold for a few weeks. Those very familiar with the Mia pattern will notice what else I had to do to add length to the skirt. I’d like to say I’ve learned my lesson about measuring before cutting, but I’m not sure I really have.

I tend to get impatient and go ahead with “time-saving” ideas. So while waiting for my extra fabric to arrive by mail, I went ahead and attached the skirt before completely finishing the bodice. That made for some very awkward sewing later on!

It’s obvious that this dress will fit for awhile and I’m always glad for that. She was pretty excited to get a maxi dress since it’s been awhile. I can’t say it will happen often though because, man, is that ever a lot of fabric!!

And there it is, my back up entry for May’s Project Run and Play theme. And it’s probably better than my first choice!