Hawaiian Dress #2

As I mentioned in the previous Hawaiian Dress post, I’ve started buying fabric when I travel and it makes a great souvenir.  So, when we were in Maui, little e chose this fabric for herself.  However, there was some miscommunication and I did not realize that she wanted to make a dress herself with the fabric, so instead, I used the fabric to make a dress for her.  Oops!  Oh well, so I promised to take her to the fabric store to get a replacement. In the meantime, she’s happy with the dress I made and promised to wear it the next two Sundays to church.

This is a very simple dress pattern and is the same one I used to make the first dress I ever made for little e (which is still her favorite dress).  The fabric I bought from Tokyo and seems to catch people’s attention because this is the only dress that little e has worn where people have liked and asked where she’s got it from.  Then she happily tells them, “my mom made it.”  =)   It’s always nice when people actually think the dresses I made were store bought rather than home made, though as an aside, my dad seems to think every dress I wear I made.  I was wearing a Tory Burch dress one day and he asked me if I made it.  Ha ha, I wish.

Anyway, back to the Hawaiian dress.  Instead of making a lining, I wrapped the edge with bias tape.  I actually like it better with a lining (above dress) because I don’t like to see that stitching line on the outside (below) and I also feel the dress has less structure without a lining.  In fact, I think this bias bind was way more work as we had to make the bias tape.

I also ended up with the same problem as I did with the other Hawaiian dress which was that I only bought 1 yard and ran out of fabric.  The previous dress I made was way “pouf-ier” and I  just didn’t have enough fabric to add to the skirt.  Little e loved twirling around in that one so I will need to buy more fabric and make her a dress more similar to that first one (which she wore to a daddy/daughter dance, by the way.)

Still, she does like this one as she loves the fabric.  My thought was to take Hawaiian prints and use them to make more modern looking dresses, rather than the traditional Hawaiian dresses (like a mu mu) so that she could get more regular wear out of them, rather than having them look costume-y.

I think this worked.  To me, at least, it looks like an everyday wear dress, but still has a bit of that island feel.

I think little e has way too many dresses now.  I’m so addicted to sewing, though and can’t stop.  Good thing that our cousins are all having baby girls now.  I want to try my hand at sewing some baby clothes, soon.