Made with love

The inspiration, store-bought dress, borrowed from my co-worker. See how the checked fabric "drifts" diagonally? (look for the purple stripes.) This is because the top of the fabric went through the pleater at a different rate of speed, compared to the bottom of the pleated fabric. Instead of taking the pleating threads out and starting over, they just left them that way and smocked the dress.















Danielle's finished dress. I used smaller checked fabric. Notice the horizontal purple stripes. It took nine attempts through the pleater because of the drifting issue. There is a bubble over the left shoulder seam on the front I'm not very happy about (not readily noticeable from this picture). After so many times going through the pleater, I had to just quit trying to make it meet my expectations, live with it, and start smocking. I don't think it was going to get any better with more attempts. There are actually four seams that need to go through a pleater when making a bishop dress. Often, one (or more) seam(s) will buckle when going through the three rollers. I haven't figured out a way to totally prevent the buckles from appearing, but sometimes I can cover them up with stitching to make them less noticeable. I just hate the fact it's a front seam.















Cute bunny buttons I found for the back of the dress. I stayed up so late Saturday night/Easter morning; I didn't have time to do a proper hem. The hemline was actually barely tacked down – not that anyone would have noticed.


Scott actually helped quite a bit with this project. I'm not as creative as you might think. I'm very good at following directions, but not good at creating something from scratch on my own. He copied the pattern of the basket and a bunny on graph paper and then made a reversed copy of the opposite bunny so I wouldn't have to "think backwards" looking at his original drafted pattern. He's been a trooper this week, single-handedly taking care of the kids and house, allowing me to get the dress done.

I took Good Friday off from work to get the dress done, thinking I could finish the smocking that day and work on finishing the construction that night. The sleeves and detailing of the roses on the basket, bunny tails, bows, and eyes took a lot longer than I had imagined. I went to bed at 2:00 AM Saturday morning and still hadn't finished the back-smocking. (When you are making a "picture" with smocking, you have to have smocked rows on the back to keep the pleats together when you take out the holding threads.)

I was up at 7:30 AM Saturday morning to get ready for the Easter festival (remember my children are early risers and 7:30 was actually me sleeping in). I spent every spare moment I could on Saturday finishing the back-smocking. It was 8:00 PM before I sat down to my sewing machine for the final construction. I'm not going to admit what time I went to bed Easter morning, but I will say I started getting punchy from sleep deprivation and began rewording Matchbox 20 lyrics as I was sewing …and he said Baby, it’s 3AM, you must be crazy…. Yeah, I know it was much funnier at the time.

So was it worth it? Absolutely. My sister asked Danielle where she got her pretty dress. Danielle replied, "My mommy made it for me…she's a good Mommy." What better compliment could I have possibly received?