Blue Gingham with Love.

So, let me start at the beginning with these outfits. The first outfit that I made was my own dress. I used it as the inspiration for the rest of the garments. I had a friend reach out to me (@becsewsthings on Instagram) with an image of a ready-to-wear garment that she loved. We dreamed and schemed about how to make it and finally hatched a plan. I’ll list all the parts of this plan below. This is the ready-to-wear garment we wanted to recreate.

I’m no stranger to blue gingham. I love it with all my heart. So I’ve fully embraced its recent resurgence in popularity. In my experience there are two consistent blue gingham fabric sources readily available. Fabric Finders and Spechler Vogel. For these outfits, I went with fabric finders from Farmhouse fabrics. To make this happen, we needed three different sizes of blue gingham. 1 inch, 1/4 inch and 1/16 inch. When I first perused their website, I was only able to find two of the sizes of matching blue gingham that I wanted. I emailed them and learned that they regularly order in all the sizes of all the gingham colors from Fabric Finders and could get it in very quickly. I then shopped their many decorative laces and came up with my lace dupes.

For the sleeve I used this insertion. For the bottom of the dress I chose this three inch edging. For the large center lace I used this Venice Guipure Galloon Beading. For the other two trims I chose these two different trims and sewed them together using a short, narrow zig zag stitch.

The trickiest part of making my dress was adding the shirred panel to the skirt. I did this by finishing off the top edge of the skirt piece, pulling my shirred panel (before completing my “smocking”) out and “blocking” it to the skirt top. I did this by pinning the panel and the skirt to my ironing board. There’s a video below that may help you visualize the process.

Aside from this step, this dress was fairly straightforward. “Smocking” the panel was not an exact science. Definitely not as precise as actual smocking but it was interesting to do. I used a tapestry needle and pearl cotton. I used the Miu MIu Dress as a guide for my “smocking.” I don’t think I did it exactly the same but my version is a similar geometric look.

Moving on to my daughter, Maria’s outfit. I made a shirt using the same instructions from this post. I added the leftover edging from my dress to the bottom of it. I added it by placing right-sides-togeher, stitching, serging the unfinished edge, pressing that serged edge up and top stitching the fabric to the serged edge. I made her shorts using cherry fabric from my stash. It is no longer in production but you can find one very similar here. Her shorts are Children’s Corner Parker’s Pants, length removed, width and scallops added. I made the scallops using the scallops I have on my lace tracing board as a template.

The two little boys have outfits made with a pattern I have self drafted and am working on making available. I used the leftover ginghams from my dress. Each boy has a sunsuit of a different sized gingham. Each gingham is piped with the smaller size gingham. So for example: the sunsuit with the 1 inch gingham fabric, is piped with a 1/4 in gingham fabric.

I’ve recently learned that I enjoy anticipation and planning almost as much as I enjoy an actual event. So the making of these outfits was extremely fun for me. Anybody else feel that way? I think it may be why I love seeing so much. That and my fabric addiction 😂