Finishing the July 4th Baby Dress

 

So, I finished the dress I started for my baby’s first 4th of July! It was rough. I became really frustrated with the ribbon. First, I pinned it in place, then I stitched around it. Not only did my stitch not come out straight, I managed to somehow sew the bottom of the Onesie™  under the skirt in an odd way.. It wasn’t pretty. THEN, I realized that the ribbon was fraying. GAH!

 

I took a deep breath and got out my seam ripper. I played a game of Pandemic with Tiger Boy and Wining Husband while I removed the ribbon. Then I tried an experiment on the ribbon I removed, which was now too short to resew because the freying was so bad.

 

 

I recalled, from the depths of my memories, that my mother would use a lighter to prevent the ends of ribbon from fraying. I got the lighter out, created a flame, and heated the end of the ribbon – success! The deterioration stopped. I remeasured out the ribbon, burned the ends, and pinned it carefully to the dress, ensuring that the Onesie™ snap section underneath was free to hang. Then, I sewed along each edge of the ribbon. Success!

 

 

My next source of frustration was the flower, which initially I had planned to sew on. I decided that was a really bad idea really quickly. So, like the ribbon, I removed it. I decided instead to use my handy glue gun set to low heat. It took forever to heat up (can you tell I get impatient?), and then I used it to put the glue on the bottom of the flower, then positioned the flower on the ribbon. Now things were getting really close to done – yay!

 

 

Since I was back on a roll, I decided that I wouldn’t wait too long to paint the dress. I cut out the star pattern from the

 

 

Cutsey Crafts post on eraser-painting. Then, I realized, “I don’t have freezer paper.” Oh well, I just used straight pins instead. Once I had the pinned star in place, I went and dug out my paint. I followed Jessica’s directions, and soon, I had the star painted.

 

 

I wasn’t sure whether I liked the finished project. I looked at it. I squinted my eyes at it. Then, as the paint dried, I realized I did, in fact like it. I hung it up on a hanger so it would finish drying. If I had it to do over, I would have waited to hem the dress until after I’d sewn the ribbon on, since to me, it appeared to be a bit lopsided.

 

The last challenge was when I was trying to take a picture of Baby Girl modeling her 4th of July dress! She was so active and hyper! So, I took a bunch of pictures of her.

 

Here’s one:

 

 

Here she is when she decided she wanted to stand:

 

 

And again, looking surprised, when I forgot to turn the flash off:

 

And here she is, looking attacking the stars on her swing:

 

 

And finally, there’s this one:

I think she likes it! I do too! She’s all ready to celebrate her first 4th of July.

 

 

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