The Flight of the Bumblebee!

All done with the Bumble Bee Dress, simplicity 2464, a Daisy Kingdom design! Here's the details:

Fabric: The white bodice and bands are a poly linen blend, the better to wash and wear. Like many her age, DD isn't into ironing so 100% linen was out. The check is 100% cotton from JA's. I was impressed. It was one of the quilt designer fabrics and quite a heavy weight. It washed beautifully and barely needed ironing. The lining is 100% poly and the frou frou (ribbon) just a poly ribbon, yellow with white dots.

Design: This is a Daisy Kingdom design from Simplicity, 2464. Like most DK designs, this has lots of pieces. I find I am attracted to DK patterns because of their uniqueness and heirloom quality. They often take large amounts of fabric but this one wasn't too bad, 2 1/4 yards total. If I made this again I would make the skirt fuller going the full width of the fabric. I love really big skirts on my children's garments, usually 90 inches plus. This one is about 65 or so. 

              The white part of the bodice is one continuous piece starting at the front midriff, going over the shoulders, and down to the back elasticized midriff. These pictures would look better if they were filled with a bit of flesh to stretch out the elastic areas. I am sure it will look great on my lanky, leggy Sophie. On either side of the midriff are bands. The lower band is meant to face up toward the shoulders but I liked the way it sort of fell into place this way and covered the gathers, so I left it. 

              I love the back of this design.It is a peakaboo hole with a tie at the top and elastic below at the waist, no zips or buttons. I know this will be really sweet once my Sophie fills it out.

Construction: I lined the bodice and am glad I did it this way. The changes to accommodate a lining are in yesterday's post. I also underlined the midriff, in other words, used a layer of lining on top of the wrong side and treated it as one piece. All of the seams were stitched and serged. The back has you stitch channels on the back midriff and insert 1/8th in elastic through them. That worked really well. When connecting the white bodice to the midriff in the back it took me three tries. Make sure you read the directions here. You do not stitch the raw edges together. Instead the elasticized midriff is laid on top of the white bodice and stitched through the top channel of the elastics. You can see that in the picture below. The hem goes very quickly as it is all machine done with a layer of contrasting linen peeking out. 

Embroidery: The bumble bee embroidery design came from Creative Needle, August 2006. I made one change however. The designer specifies doing turkey work for the wings. To me they did not show enough. I chose instead to use four strands of floss and a simple lazy daisy to make the wings. Two strands of floss were white and two strands of floss were 3756, an extremely light blue. The two colors gave it a little depth and contrast to the snow white bodice.

Conclusion: I really like this pattern and recommend. I think it has lots of style for a little fashionista, as do many of the DK patterns. It also comes with a coordinating pocketbook and I will be starting on that shortly! I hope those of you who have this sitting int the stash get some fabric and stitch it up. It is not hard to do at all. Caveat: this is one of those patterns where you really do have to read and follow the directions closely. 

**********************************************************************************

As I was taking pics of Sophie's new dress, I turned and knocked over my nicely organized box of needles. Oy........Bunny