Christmas Dresses

I closed my etsy shop a few days before Christmas so that I could make some Christmas dresses for this girls. (My regular website meringuedesigns.net stayed open because those are just electronic designs.) Now when I say Christmas dresses, I don’t mean red taffeta trimmed in green ric rac.
Gag. 
I mean special dresses. Instead of spending my usual 1-2 hours sewing a simple cotton dress I spent 3-4 hours on each dress with all the embroidery, decorative stitching, silk bias binding, etc. I couldn’t love them more.
this is probably the worst pictures I have ever taken (Ilene’s head is cut off!) and they both look all pale and hungry, but there was too much snow outside to take this outside. Hence their awesome patent faux leather boots.

I used this crazy Danish pattern by Onion. I say crazy because no seam allowances are given, only a rough translation is given in English, and zero illustrations show you what exactly you are doing. In other words, there are no directions. You better not be a beginner with these patterns which is a shame because they are super simple to construct. But I had wanted a wrap (or faux wrap) dress pattern for the girls and this was all I could find. The pattern is super simple, you just gotta know what y0u’re doing. The dress pattern is kind of boxey so I made both dresses the same size—all I did differently was length the bodice and hem 2” on Ilene’s dress.
I left out the leftover denim for this photo so you could just see how much sampling I did of the binding and various stitching before I did the real thing.

How awesome is the embroidery design on Hallie’s dress? It’s my own combo of designs from this collection by OESD. I am obsessed with variegated threads in this type of open embroidery work. This is probably the best design pack I have ever bought. I use it a lot of denim. Ok, so I’ve only ever bought like 4 packs! I prefer to use my own designs most of the time.

The hummingbird is stitched out in a combo of variegated and metallic threads. I’d rather have a root canal than use metallic threads too often, but I suffered through it.  Hallie’s dress was sewn/embroidered on my Bernina 450. It was the last time I used it before trading it in. I hope it goes to a good home. *Sniff*

Ilene’s dress was sewn exclusively on my new Bernina 830. It’s hard to tell here but the design on the skirt is a mass of butterflies in variegated pink thread. Love that new jumbo hoop that came with the 830. Hot diggity dog,  no re-hooping required here.


The bodice is embroidered with another set of the butterflies. This lousy picture is blurry so you can’t see how cute the stitching is on the silk bias binding, but trust me, it’s cute.  So that’s it for the girls dresses! They loved them, I loved them, success.