The day before my birthday this year I woke up and thought; I want a new dress for my birthday! Yeah I didn’t give myself a whole lot of time on this one. But to be fair I had planned out the dress well before my birthday, several months before in fact.
I came across the blue cat fabric while searching online for fabric for a baby quilt. I was not supposed to be buying more fabric for myself; I have fabric in my stash that I am supposed to be whittling down. But I didn’t have enough blue fabric for the quilt I was making. That is the only reason I was even looking at fabric. But as is all too common when looking for a particular fabric I fell in love with some other fabric. This time the cat fabric, I wanted it, it needed it, I had to have it, and it had to be in a dress. I thought though it might be a bit of an over whelming pattern for an entire dress though so I came up with the idea of making it a border on a 1950’s style dress and I knew the pattern I wanted to use. Simplicity #2499 it’s from the 1950’s and I have used it before to make myself and my sister a dress.
This pattern is relatively easy to make very straight forward and has a side zipper. I was impressed I had a blue zipper in my stash already so I didn’t even have to worry about the zipper. The lace and ribbon I used it also from my stash.
I ordered the fabric online and was not very impressed with the coordinating solid blue. Online it looked wonderful, it was in the suggestions as a coordinating blue, but when I got it it’s not really a blue I would have chosen in person. I miss the whole shopping in person thing. I had planned on making the dress the moment I got the fabric but when I saw the blue I was a might downtrodden over it and packed it away thinking well maybe in a while I can go shopping in person and find a better color.
As time went by it was becoming more and more obvious that was not going to happen and I had the fabric, and the fabric itself is a beautiful weight. I would buy that kind again it was just not quite the right color (the camera makes the blues look a lot closer than they do in person). I decided to just get over it, I bought the fabric for the dress I was going to use it for the dress even if that particular blue is nowhere in the cat pattern. And I think it looks okay once it’s all sewn up, yeah I would have been over the moon in love with it if it’d been a slightly different shade of blue, but even being the shade it is I love it.
I wasn’t sure I could get the dress done in time for my birthday. It’s been a long time since I did a dress in a day but there is something about having a deadline. I was off that day so I had the entire day to work on it. And it took the whole day. But I got it done finishing it around 9pm. I did alter the design a bit beyond adding the border I gathered the skirt rather than pleating it like the pattern calls for. I don’t think gathering is any easier than the pleats I just wanted it gathered.
The cat border is about 10” wide which I figure is just about perfect. And to finish it off to perfection for this year I made me a matching mask, which will probably get used a lot more than the dress, as I don’t have much of an occasion to wear a cute dress these days. But the days will come, and I will be ready.
