Elsa Dress!

Elsa Dress

My daughter was invited to a "princess party". Despite being a 5 year old girl, we are lacking in the princess dress department. We have a two year old Rapunzel dress from Target that's coming apart. I asked her what she wanted to wear and she said, maybe you could make me an Elsa dress?

I saw that coming a mile away, and had already started looking for online tutorials. There wasn't ONE that really worked for me, but I saw a lot of photos and decided it would be easiest to make the top with a shirt overlay and just a separate skirt. Oh, and a cape... a long cape.

I think it took longer to fabric shop with a 5 year old than it did to make everything.

I purchased a short sleeved shirt with rhinestones from Kohls to use as the top base.

From there, I cut the shiny blue material in a sweetheart design to attach to the shirt.

 

I wrapped the shiny blue around the shirt and just sewed it along the top and bottom.

She wanted a dress, not a shirt and skirt, but I wasn't sure the shirt could handle the weight of the skirt fabric and the cape she wanted. In the end, it was two separate pieces.

  

She didn't seem to mind that it was two pieces.

The cape is almost 2 yards of fabric so it would be long as requested :-)

I attached the cape to the shirt with Velcro so it could be removed if and when she got sick of it.

 

Box Pleat Skirt

Black and White Box Pleat Skirt

I always have big dreams of skirts, but am short and things never fit right! Since the advent of Pinterest, I can't help but dream of all the awesome things I could attempt to make. I quilt a lot, but don't do a lot of clothing. Enter the Box Pleat Skirt...

Box Pleat Tutorial

One of the many tutorials I found, this one seemed the most straight forward and easiest to follow. I read through all the directions, read all the comments and decided (against my better judgement) to attempt something with a zipper!

I purchased the same Ikea Fabric. As a shorter person (5'2"), I purchased 3 yards for my waist, but had enough for two skirts because of how wide the fabric was/is.

So many pins!

 For every pleat, there's 9" of fabric, so you'll be dealing with a LOT of fabric.

Longer length

 Pin before you hem!! I was tempted to take off two stripes worth. That would have been indecent. Much like curly hair, the shorter it is, the more it sticks out rather than laying straight. In the end I only took off the bottom stripe and as you can see in the final photo, it seems much shorter than that.

I really hate zippers

I didn't even want to post this photo, since it looks so bad.

Things I would have changed... Make the zipper closer to the pleats, 

and maybe just embrace it and try and exposed zipper.

Final Result!