Hello Everyone! It’s Amanda from @sewingcotton popping in to share my latest project. If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I love to sew children’s clothes, especially dresses!
My daughter loves dresses with her favorite story book characters, and as soon as she saw the borderprint from the Littlest Families Big Day collection by Emily Winfield Martin for Riley Blake Designs, she insisted I make a pretty dress for her. She didn’t have to tell me twice!
For this dress, I used the blush borderprint and the yellow dots to sew up a Children’s Corner Katina. Then, I added just a touch of teal smocking to tie it all together.
Because I knew there was no chance of her waiting to wear it until next spring, I sized up so that she could wear it as a jumper over a long sleeve undershirt all winter. This was a fair compromise for me because Katina is one of my very favorite patterns, and almost as soon as I saw the borderprint, I knew the pattern I wanted to sew with it.
I love the cool and soothing pastels of this collection. It comes in four main colorways: cream, blush, aqua and yellow. In addition to the borderprints, the collection also boasts cute dots, book stacks, florals and several adorable variations of character repeats. If you’ve never sewn on a borderprint, this fabric is a nice one to start on because the space between the characters is well over a quarter inch which made it quite easy to match the patterns. I also appreciated that it was a double border. For this dress skirt, I did the whole thing for a little less than a yard by the simple expedience of cutting the fabric in half and using both sides of the border for the skirt. It took a little more time to pattern match, but it was well worth it in the end to see her so happy twirling around in it.
Happy Sewing!
Amanda
The Littlest Family’s Big Day, designed by Emily Winfield Martin, is available now at your favorite local quilt shops and online retailers! Order yours today and share your makes with us on Instagram using #rileyblakedesigns #iloverileyblake and tag us @rileyblakedesigns.