Dress a Girl Around the World.

This weekend I finally sat down and made not one, bit two pillowcase dresses for 'Dress a Girl Around the World' appeal. This charity appeal has kept popping up for a while now. To start with I read about it while reading Sewhip then Amanda at KitschyCoo Kids mentioned how she was going to make a couple and I kept thinking I *must* make a couple of dresses but last weekend, while planning for my weekly sewing class, I had a quite look on Facebook, like you do when you are hard at work ;) and noticed my friend talking again about making pillowcase dresses. An idea formed....if I taught the lovely ladies at my sewing class how to make these dresses, they would be able to practise their basic sewing skills but they would also be able to play around with embellishing, frills, any manner of decoration, while making things for a really good cause.

I spoke to the ladies last week and they all loved the idea and the staff at the Children's Centre also loved the idea and wanted me to write an article about it for their newsletter, so we decided that after we had finished making bags this week, we would start on our dresses. This weekend I made a couple of examples. First one using this pattern and a pillowcase. It took all of 15 mins to make;


Next I used this pattern, using fabric rather than the pillowcase because last year, I decided in a tidy-fest, I would give all of my old pillowcases to the charity shop so I don't have many old pillowcases but I do have funky retro duvet covers.....

This dress took longer to cut out than to sew. Again in 20 minutes or so, it was finished.


Both are great, super-easy patterns and I was really looking forward to seeing what everyone came up with today. So, imagine how annoyed I was this morning when I woke up, got up, felt a bit dizzy then nearly fainted when I went outside to let the chickens out. I came inside, started making my failsafe Rice Krispies breakfast (after months of morning sickness with J and L, I could still eat Rice Krispies) but it was no good so I ended up in bed and having to cancel the lesson. I figured that if I had been able to get to the lesson, I could maybe teach but wasn't sure if I had a bug, people with little babies wouldn't like me much and I didn't feel safe to drive. A few hours in bed, I feel quite a bit better, although more dizzy than is necessary for everyday life!

We'll try again next week. I've had some fab ideas. If you have got any pillowcase that you want to send to a good home, let me know! Or random bits of bias binding or if you have been inspired to have a go and make some, that's great!