Rebecca's Holiday Frock: Designing My Own Version

I thought I was done making dresses for my friend's daughter Rebecca. "That is enough pink and purple!" I said.

Then I remembered that I had a scrap of blue fabric left over from a quilt my friend made in grad school.

So I decided I wanted to make this into another dress. I didn't want this to be the main color of the dress for two reasons. One, I didn't know how much of this fabric I had- possibly not enough for an entire dress. Two, if this was the one dress the little girl had that was not in her favorite color, she might not like it for that reason. So I decided to make a purple dress  with blue accents.

I looked around at all the 1914-era dress patterns that I had not made yet, and none of them seemed just right. (Okay, too many of them had pleated skirts.)

Then I looked at dresses that American Girl had made for Rebecca.

I decided that I really liked Rebecca's new Beforever Holiday Outfit. It was even almost the same color scheme that I wanted to use.

The two-layer skirt was too complicated for what I wanted to do, but I decided to made a facsimile of the bodice and put it on a regular one-layer skirt.

As it turned out, I did not look closely enough at the sleeves used on the AG dress, because I did not realize what they looked like until after I finished my version.

To make the dress, I took a bodice pattern. I drew the shapes that I wanted for the design onto it, using a ruler because I cannot draw a straight line to save my life.

I then traced the shapes I wanted, and added seam allowances as needed.

Then I cut and sewed and ironed and sewed some more.

I actually ended up using three different fabrics for the dress- one purple for the main dress, a subtly darker purple for the collar framing the center triangle, and the blue for the center triangle.

The final product is pretty nice! It is not quite perfect in a lot of little details, but I don't think they detract too much from my original vision. I could improve on many of these faults if I wanted to revise my pattern pieces.

I am really very proud of this dress.

All of the dresses from this newest batch are really cute!