Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Birds of a Feather Sundress

At the end of last summer I grabbed some of these cute sundresses for Annaliese in the next size when they were on clearance. I used one of them this week:
I was fascinated by Hang To Dry's "Birds of a Feather" design and wanted to give it a go. I think Crissie's turned out so much cuter, it looks great on white! Still not sure what I think about it on this turquoise....
The design is 3 rows of birds, but I was limited by the space on the bodice, so I deleted the third line. This light airy design made it easy to fill the space on that dress even with the gathered waistband.
I wanted something big on the bottom, so I used Lynnie Pinnie's Simple Bird. But since the flock of birds at the top was finished with a triple bean stitch, I didn't want the thick satin stitches on LP's bird. So I simply used her tackdown stitches and left it raggy. I merged it with a line from the HTD design, but it doesn't really show up well as Annaliese wears the dress.
Annaliese helped me pick all the fabrics for this. Once we selected the stripe for the large bird, I let her pick the nine fabrics for the little birds from my scraps. And I mean scraps! These birds are tiny and don't require much fabric at all!! I did use a layer of white felt under them to help the color pop and not be dulled out by the dark background.

Two more dresses... a pink and a purple. I need to figure out what to put on them ASAP!

2 comments:

  1. I love the birds! That's a great idea about using white felt to obscure the background fabric. I always forget that I can use my applique designs as raggedy edge finishes too. Thanks for the tips!!

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