Sewnhenge – Mara Dress with Golden Trims

Hello! I am super excited to be here for the Mara Action! My name is Michelle and I have a little blog over at Sewnhenge. I had been eyeing this Mara Blouse for a while and when Marta picked me to be one of the people involved in this, I nearly did a flip!

My first impression of this pattern was just how easy it was to put together with the pdf file. I have had some patterns in the past that required me to print FIFTY pages. This was an absolute TREAT only having 16!! Everything lined up perfectly and easily. Only having a 4×4 block to square up and tape together was SO awesome! The options are nice too, you can either take it to a local printer to have the large format, or do at at home, with OR without seam allowances! Pretty nice if you ask me!

Millie is a big 4 year old, so I always just sew up a size 5 without even measuring her, but this time I actually took her measurements and she fit into the 4 perfectly. I realize that usually it is the height that throws her into the size 5 and even 6 sometimes, so I’m really glad I checked it all out since this fits her better than I would have hoped!

Since we live in Texas, I thought the sleeveless option fit our lifestyle better than any of the sleeve options. It has already hit 99 degrees here so we want to avoid as much fabric as possible :) To add interest, I finished the arm holes with a fun embroidery stitch and golden thread. I used some leftover fabric from the back of the quilt I made a friend of mine. It is Sweet Serenade, Rough Dot Cotton Fabric in Teal Designed by Basic Grey for Moda Fabrics. It is a super soft quilting cotton and sewed up deliciously for this dress. I just happened to have all this gold trim laying around and I thought the teal plus the gold would be so pretty.. I think I was right! I got those pretty delicate buttons from Joanne’s.

I really wanted to show my original version of this dress, which I was really excited about but Millie nixed the idea, only after it was completed, of course. :/ I wanted to put a ruffled bottom on the dress, thinking that is what she would love, plus I thought it would be adorable… So I sewed it all up and when I showed it to her she refused to even try it on. Apparently Millie is over the ruffles and just wanted a plain A line dress. So I painstakingly picked out all those seams and hemmed it up into a simple dress. I wanted to add a little fun to it so I used the same subtle embroidery stitch on the hem as I did on the sleeve(less) part with the gold embroidery thread. I couldn’t get a sharp picture of the finished hem so you’ll have to use your imagination :) If I want to be honest with myself, I think she was right about removing the ruffle. The dress looks fantastic as a simple A line.. What a little designer I have!

I’m so happy she approves of the new changes, this dress has quickly become one of her favorites :) She has worn it for a couple days in a row, even refusing to take it off to put on pajamas!

The construction of this dress went very smoothly, the pattern directions were superb and everything lined up exactly the way it should. You can tell a lot of care went into the designing and instructions of this pattern!

I absolutely love and recommend this pattern and plan on sewing up more in the very near future! I don’t often use trim or piping in my sewing, but I think that will change, it was super easy and it adds such an amazing dynamic to the design!

Thanks for having me here!