Baptism Dress

Have you ever had a project in which you could NOT mess it up?  You pretty much had one chance to get it right?  Well, this baptism dress was that project for me.  And I am pretty excited with how it turned out.  It’s nothing too fancy, but still cute.

One of our friends asked me if I would make a baptism dress out of her mother’s wedding dress.  She said her mom was just going to throw the dress away anyway, so there was no pressure.  This is something that I could NOT mess up though.  It was going to have sentimental value after all.

I was hesitant to say yes I would try, because I had never sewn a dress before.  Since I was planning on making Lillian a V-Neck t-shirt using Peek-A-Boo Pattern Shop’s pattern, I decided to get my butt in gear and make it so I would know if it was even possible for me to make a baptism dress.  (I will blog about the t-shirt later)  Come to find out, shirts are not that difficult and a dress is basically a long shirt!

I found a few dress patterns and emailed them to my friend to try to get a general idea of what she liked.  She had one that she really liked, but when I saw the wedding dress, I got a few ideas of how to incorporate the details of it into the baptism dress.

I essentially made a miniature wedding dress that wasn’t quite as fancy.  I took the original sleeves and made them into the sleeves for the baptism dress.  I also used the “lace” at the bottom of the wedding dress for the bottom of the baptism dress.  Not only did both incorporate the details into the baptism dress, but it made my life pretty easy…no need to do any hemming!

To make the dress and pattern I combined a few tutorials and used the Hangout Hoodie pattern pieces, just the sleeve and dress pieces though.  I adjusted the pattern pieces using tips from Craftiness is Not Optional’s Charlotte Dress Sew-A-Long.  I also used this tutorial to help with puffier sleeves.

Since the fabric wasn’t stretchy, I decided to add an invisible zipper to the back so that the dress would actually fit over the baby’s head.  I’m so glad that I recently purchased the invisible zipper foot and made pillowcases.  Adding the invisible zipper was super easy and was indeed invisible, except for the zipper pull.

The wedding dress had a lining so I just used the same material for the lining of the dress, except for the top front piece.  I wish I knew what type of fabric this was, but I have no idea.  Without my walking foot, this dress would have been much more difficult to sew.

I’m pretty sure the bottom of the dress was not uneven like it appears in the pictures.  I think it’s just hanging on the hanger kind of crooked.

This dress was fairly easy to make and I now want to sew more shirts and dresses for Lillian.  I have a few of the patterns from Peek-A-Boo Pattern shop and just ordered some knit from Girl Charlee, so in the next few months you should expect to see more clothes.

As a note, I am an affiliate for Peek-A-Boo Pattern shop so I will get a small commission for any item you order through the links in this post.  I decided to become an affiliate for a few reasons.  One is because I really like the patterns that they sell, and Amy seems to be quickly adding new patterns and I seriously like every single one of them.  The other reason is because I essentially get a discount for every pattern that I purchase since I get the commission from the patterns.