Frozen Inspired Dress

If you are a household with girls of a certain age, chances are you are going to know most, if not all, of the words to 'Let it Go', and possibly a few other Frozen songs too. We are most definitely a household with such girls, and I'm pretty good up till the end of the second verse! Venetia and Maria aren't completely obsessed with the film, although they have watched it a couple of times, but they do love the songs. And I realised quite a while back that if I wanted to make something that the girls would really appreciate this Christmas, my best bet was Frozen dresses. The trouble was that I didn't much like the Elsa dress, which is, of course, the dress the girls would want. Don't get me wrong, it looks amazing on an animated Elsa, I just don't think, personally, that it translates very appropriately or flatteringly to 5 and 7 year old girls. So after quite a bit of deliberating I decided to just do my own thing and make Frozen inspired dresses which aren't trying in any way to be identical to the real thing. Hopefully the girls will still love to dress up in them as they bounce on the bed singing 'Let it Go' at the top of their voices!

So this one is for Maria and it was very simple. It was completely based on the nightgown I made back here. 

1) I cut out my basic shape from an old, white, flannelette sheet (deja vue for a moment here, I'm not going to call these nighties but I am thinking they might very well stay on overnight at times, so I wanted them to be comfortable too). And then I laid this out on an old, blue voile curtain I found in a Charity Shop, and cut duplicate pieces.

2) I sewed the two together, but just at the neck and sleeves, I wanted it to be lovely and floaty in the dress part, rather than joined.

3) I then sewed just the white, underdress sides together, right sides together.

4) And cut out my sleeves just from the sheer blue fabric, as per the original pattern but sized up for Maria, and sewed them on to the sleeve holes both sides.

We're getting near the end now and in typical 'me' fashion, I got all excited about finishing and forgot about taking any more pictures. But it is all very easy, honestly!

5) I sewed the sides, ie the sheer blue fabric, together, right sides together, starting at the tip of the sleeve and going straight down, past the arm hole to the bottom of the dress.

6) I had bought a metre of cheap, but gorgeously snowflakey sheer fabric (there's loads of it around!) and I cut a cloak size rectangle from this and hemmed it along the bottom - the edges of the fabric were sort of sealed and using those as the sides of my cloak gave me what felt like the perfect size, so I didn't need to hem them. I then sewed it to the back of my neckline, gathering as I went to get a full, flowing cloak effect.

7) As per the original pattern I turned over a narrow hem and then a slightly wider one around the neckline to elasticate the neck. And, again as per the original, I elasticated the sleeves.

8) Finally I hemmed the bottom. Easy peasy.

I say 'finally' but actually, you can probably see I hand sewed a smattering of silver snowflake sequins on to the front as well.

And here is the cloak at the back, which I think will be Maria's favourite part.

This is a dress that I'd love to photograph actually on Maria to show you, but I'm afraid it's waiting till Christmas! And I have also finished a different Frozen dress for Venetia for Christmas, but I'll save that for tomorrow. It wasn't tricky, but I seem to have taken quite a lot more photos of the making of that one, and since I started it a couple of weeks ago and have been making it in dribs and drabs ever since, when no girls were around, I'm really struggling to remember what I was doing at each stage and make sense of all my photos myself! Hopefully by tomorrow it will be clear as ice!

I'm going to link up with Ho, ho, ho and on we sew again, and this month you'll find it over here. In fact I'm sure there are a few recent makes I could be linking up there, everything I'm making at the moment seems to be Christmas related in some way of other.

Sally.