Birthday Dresses & Ballgown

It's been a challenging week so far as the lace dresses I was making was concerned. In the end, after redoing the bodice linings several times, I ended up going with a pale yellow after all. I decided I already had too many pink lace dresses, so decided to stay with yellow. But that first yellow satin was just too bright a yellow. So I ended up using the inner lining from the toddler dress that I'd washed and taken apart. It was a very pale yellow, and made all the embroidery on the lace stand out nicely.....

Which left me with the rest of the toddler dress. I didn't feel like putting it all away into storage all in pieces, so thought I'd make a gown out of it.  But for who??  It had to be a bigger doll,because there were yellow roses attached to the tulle skirt, so I had to leave the length of it as long as possible.  So I chose my Nelly. I've not made anything her size in years.

Then I had nothing but trouble with the sleeve cuffs on Nelly's dress. The satin lining was so slippery, and the cuffs kept getting all deformed when I'd sew the lace to the satin.  I redid them several times, until there was just one piece of the lace left that was still big enough. I ended up cutting a length of satin ribbon instead, and wrapped the lace around that. Finally I had proper sleeve cuffs! The bodice wasn't quite long enough either, and I'd used up all the satin and lace, so couldn't redo it, so I sewed a wide ribbon waistband along the bottom of the bodice to lengthen it neatly extending the length of the bodice, both inside and out....

The next step is to sew the yards and yards of tulle skirt onto the bodice.