Badminton Dress: a new 'robe-y'

Having slogged through the patching of many pairs of jeans, and having sewn up all my remaining Liloup summer sets (that I cut out two months ago, ahem...), I treated myself to sewing a dress for my two year-old today!  Over the past few months she's become very opinionated about her clothing and will reject the outfits that my husband or I pick out for her in the morning.  Over the past week or so she's become very interested in wearing "robe-ys," her take on the French word for dress (robe).  As in, "You have a big robe-y, Maman!"  or "You have robe-y, I have robe-y.  Same, same!"  I guess this is part of her developing gender identification.  Her favorite morning activity involves putting on a robe-y (usually over a teeshirt and pants, at our insistence) and listening to her new, favorite musician Vanessa Trien.  Then she'll swish the hem of her dress around while dancing to any number of songs about barn animals and driving cars.

Enter the Oliver + S Badminton Dress.  I love these patterns.  They are just classy, in this way that makes regular patterns look downright tawdry, and fun for sewists like me who get into geeky details.  While I could never pay $16 for a pattern, certain generous family members indulged me for my birthday (thanks, Dad!) and paired with some new Denyse Schmidt fabrics from JoAnn (Meadowlark, cream circles on orange; and Aunt Edna, multicolored circles on burgundy), I was ready to go.


I do have a few criticisms of Oliver + S patterns, which surely reflect my familiarity with mainsteam patterns' conventions.  Seam allowances are 1/2" not 5/8", which matters because my presser foot doesn't have a mark at 1/2".  Cutting layout is buried in the tissue pattern instead of printed on the directions sheets.

These problems were trifles compared to the serious errors I made from not reading the directions carefully, though.  Suffice to say that I had the opportunity to redo the entire ribbon casing right before attaching the neck binding.  And that I did the neck binding twice.

But wasn't it all worth it for THIS?




And this!  I don't love how the darker color shows through the hem but the scalloping is a pretty grand effect for little effort.  I made a stitching guide out of a cereal box which helped me mark where to stitch and which I used to press the hem when it was done.