Kitty Pinafore dresses

When I originally got my hands on a Kitty pinafore dress pattern, free with Simply Sewing mag, my little girl was already too big for me to make it for her, so it got added to the stash for a possible future gift.  Its time to shine came in October, when a friend’s daughter celebrated a birthday at the beginning of the month, and her sister at the end of the same month.  In the meantime I had picked up an extra copy of the pattern in a charity shop for 50p, so I didn’t even need to trace two different sizes!

The pattern design is brilliant, but the practicalities of making the dress were a bit challenging.  First of all, you have to add your own seam allowance to the pattern.  I know this isn’t a huge deal, but when you are used to cutting from commercial paper patterns, usually the seam allowance is included already, so it’s very easy to forget at the last minute.  Even though I did remember to add seam allowance, I later discovered I should have added an extra 3cm to the back waistband seam allowance.  I missed this, and so had to cut a separate waistband.  It mustn’t be very clear that you need to do this at the cutting stage, because I did the exact same thing when I came to cut out the second dress!

The cat face is very cute but does take a while to get it looking perfect.  I used the blanket stitch setting on my machine at the slowest possible speed for the eyes and nose, and then I hand stitched the whiskers using embroidery floss.  The result is great though, and I enjoyed choosing scraps of contrasting fabric for the cat’s features.

The straps are attached at the back by a button which I chose to fasten to the outer waistband rather than the inner.  That way I could showcase a pretty button and I thought it would be more comfortable to wear.  In the end, both girls had to have a supplementary button hole added into the straps to make them shorter.

As you can see I made the dresses slightly different to reflect their different personalities.  The older girl’s dress is made from denim, and her younger sister’s is made from red twill (red is her favourite colour!).  Both girls loved the dresses and I believe the pockets went down well too!