The dress is badly wrinkled, I know, I know. But it was finished just this afternoon, popped over dgd Laurel’s sweet head in the church parking lot, worn to the pot luck supper for VBS and then worn home–lots of good reasons to be wrinkled. When I asked her to let me take a few pictures, she replied, “Please hurry, Nana! We’re going for a night swim!”  So there you have it–this was the best I could do. Please imagine it freshly pressed, as it was before the church supper.
All About Blanks carries these 60% ramie/40% cotton dresses ($24) and they are wonderful. There is a double row of drawn thread work at the hemline while the neck and armscyses are bound with self bias. They come in white and pink sizes 12M to 6, though currently many sizes are temporarily out of stock. It also comes in yellow dotted Swiss ($28) but only up to size 4.  Note that they run almost a size large. Eight year old Laurel is on the small side of average and wears this 6 quite comfortably. I made up a white one last year (size 5) that she can still wear.
Now about the embroidery, about which I am pretty pleased. The designs are from Lulu in Paris by Great Notions. There are two Eiffel towers in this collection, one featuring Lulu herself perched on the iconic structure. But it was too large (5 x 7) to fit on the bodice of this size 6 dress. The simpler, smaller tower (4×4) would look nice, I thought, with Paris written below. But once again, the design was too large. So Paris was just superimposed on the tower and that works.
At the hemline, several French phrases are embroidered. She and her brother study Latin so I’m always pointing out root words to them. So I explained the root and meaning of Merci, Bonjour, Je t’aime, ooh la la, oui oui, Joie de vivre (try explaining that to an 8 year old!) which are embroidered just above the drawn threadwork
The border hoop for my Quattro has been sitting idle so I thought this would be a good time to give it a try. Of course, the text phrases aren’t really a border, but I learned about hooping, slipping the fabric through, etc. It was so much faster and easier than regular hooping for 6 designs. It was a good intro for me.
On one back yoke, another design was added, for rear view interest. There was no time to replace the buttons with mother-of-pearl, so I simply restitched them in black. A black triple straight stitch was worked around the neckline and armscyes but that gave me a lot of trouble. Being in a hurry seemed to make this very difficult. No one at the supper seemed to notice the imperfections, though.
UPDATE~~I just checked the blog on the white dress I embroidered with ladybugs for Laurel. I should have checked sooner–no wonder I had trouble with the top stitching this time. I used 60 wt. thread. As stated in the other post, The final modification I made to the dress was to top stitch in black thread around the neckline and armholes. I used 12 wt Coty thread, #90 needle and a 3.0 length to  straight stitch right over the existing white topstitching that holds the bias binding in place.
Have you done any quick projects like this lately? What are you sewing?
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