Happy birthday to Nore & a give away!

A twin means two birthday dresses to sew every year! But this year I was glad that I could make two dresses because I had two ideas in mind. The Maggie Mae dress was the easy project! This dress was a challenge! A big challenge! When I saw Dominique Ver Eecke’s fabrics appearing on Mondepot, the red leaf fabric got my attention straight away. When I picked it up at Katelijne’s place, she asked me for which project the fabric was. No idea at that time! But I just needed to have this fabric! It’s special. Not only the print but also the texture. It doesn’t wrinkle! Nice when you don’t like to iron like me…

For this second B-day dress a crazy idea started to grow. I wanted to use this fabric, but in combination with a pattern that didn’t ‘break’ the print. So I wanted to keep it in 1 piece. But how do you add some volume then? Without just ending with a simple A-line dress. That would not be a perfect B-day dress of my princess I thought. I started thinking about folding the fabric, matching the print and adding volume at the waist height. I drew a pattern, specially for this fabric! I started from the Louisa bodice part, added small sleeves and then tried to get a lot of volume by making pleats. 

This was absolutely not an easy project! For the pattern, I did get some help from my teacher (thanks Alma). I learned a lot from this project. For example that prints are not always perfectly parallel. Not in this case!! So it was a difficult assignment to get the print right, but at the end I’m fairly happy with the result. The blind zipper was the most difficult part! I also learned that being patient helps! I took 4 evenings to sew this dress. Never took me so much time to finish a project. I prepared everything in detail to get the ‘perfect result’. And it is not perfect at all, but as perfect as I could. Nore was very happy with the result! Me too. That’s what counts when you take your time again and sew just for fun!

This weekend you will see both princesses in their dresses discovering their birthday presents: new rooms. Can you imagine that I had to empty my sewing room to give Nore her own bedroom…. Mixed feelings here!

GIVE AWAY!

Now let’s go back to Mondepot! I contacted Katelijne and asked if she had more of this fabric left because it had disappeared from her shop. Sold out! OMG! Such a pity! But but but… She still has 130cm left, she wants to give away… to you!!! How fantastic is that!? This is the most special fabric I have ever worked with. So grab your chance to win this very-beautiful-Ver Eecke-unique-piece-of-fabric.

You can enter the contest HERE.

It’s an international contest. Open to every one until Sunday. Good luck!

Edit 17 February: Lila S. from the Netherlands has won this fabric. Congratulations!