Flowery dress

I had a large piece of this flowery cotton fabric that I bought about four years ago at a second hand stall at a church fete. What better place to buy stuff than summer fetes? I am a great lover of these events as I think they are something quintessentially British but in a good way (I am not really a very patriotic person). Anyway, I digress, so I pulled the fabric out of the storage box as part of the Stash bustin project and made this little dress for my daughter. I used an old Simplicity pattern that I had found in a charity shop. It was for age 1 to 18 months and my daughter is nearly three so I had a go at resizing the pattern. You could almost hear the rusty cogs in my brain whirring as I tried to work out the pattern dimensions. I used Cal Patch's book on making your own clothes for guidance in how to resize a pattern. It is a fairly short-ish dress as I have found dresses below the knee may look very sweet but they tend to trip up a girl who wants to run around.

The original pattern pistured below, ( I made the pink dress/pinafore in the picture) has a vertical lace trim and a ribbon round the bodice - both of which I left out. I also bound the armholes with bias binding made from the same fabric. I have a big pile of this binding to use now in some more projects and also some more of the fabric to use - enough I think for another child's dress. I am thinking of trying a different pattern, though I like the look of the bloomers in this pattern picture.