Birthday Dress

I thought I take a break from the stashbusting madness and share a post on a surprise project, it just happened to fit in perfectly with January's theme of one yard or less. :)

Surprise! It's your birthday!

Wild Thing, not-niece number three, is turning two on Sunday. I had forgotten all about this. To top it off, she informed me on Tuesday that her favorite color is ORANGE. (yes, she has a large vocabulary for someone almost 2) Now, orange is not my favorite color and I live too far from the fabric store to get there and back and made before her birthday party. Thankfully I was able to scrounge around and find a few things.

Wild Thing likes to tear around the house, dressing up in
whatever takes her fancy. This was during her "shoe phase"

McCall's 7226 was a great little swing dress pattern with the simple silhouette I was looking for. It also had lining pieces that fit on my bright orange fat quarter.
I love linings and how they allow you to dispense with all those fiddly facings. For this dress I wanted the orange to look like the bodice so I flipped the "lining" piece to the outside of the dress after grading seams and clipping the curves.

Grading: to trim your seam allowance two different heights.
The "outer" fabric is always the longer one. 

Clipping Tip: clip the seams DIAGONALLY to the seam allowance
instead of straight down. Clip the seam allowance opposite directions 

Result: The fabrics overlap when pulled around the curve and eliminate
those dips or "witch's teeth" Just try it! You will be amazed at the results!

I stitched the pink corduroy 1/4 inch seam lining it up along the edge of the orange bodice. After I had sewn, hemmed and gathered all three of my skirt ruffles I pinned them to the white lining. The top skirt ruffle went under the corduroy. The succeeding ruffles were carefully [note to self: measure next time instead of just eyeballing it!] pinned down with the 1/4 in. gathered line under the hemline of preceeding ruffle. I topstitched them down with some peachy orange ribbon.
After sewing the center back seam and inserting the zipper; voila! I had a perfect orange birthday present! I made it long and a bit wider so she can wear it now with a turtleneck underneath and this summer.

For you stashbusters, I used 4 stash pieces of fabric and one ribbon. The pink corduroy was from one of my first skirts, the bright orange was from college and the ruffle fabric was from one of my first attempts at making things to sell. The lining was given to me by someone cleaning out their stash; so, for not trying to fulfill a stash project I certainly managed well!

I'm just tickled that my idea turned out, mostly, the way I imagined it would! Plus I got Wild Thing's present done in plenty of time!

Have you ever felt the joy of a project turned out just right? How's the stashbusting going? There's lots of amazingness on Flickr! Keep up the inspiration, guys!