Have you heard of the Jiggle Jam? It is a kids music festival in Kansas City that occurs on Memorial weekend each year. It is a BLAST. My sister lives in Kansas City so when I discovered Jiggle Jam early last year, we decided we had to go! And we returned this year. I think it will become a tradition. I decided the clever girl needed a special outfit for Jiggle Jam this year, and was inspired to create a rendition of the Warhol Dress by MADE. To make it a special Jiggle Jam dress, I did an applique of a guitar on the front!
This dress was made of 100% re-purposed materials. The blue dress used to be one of Mr. Clever Mom's white undershirts. I decided he had plenty of other white undershirts and dyed this one navy blue. Remember how I said I was totally inspired by my experience dying the purple shorts? Well, this was experiment number two! It took many tries to get this dress the navy blue I wanted, in a relatively even dye. I probably should have used a bigger bowl for dying the shirt. I just kept checking on the color, giving it a stir and trying to rearrange the fabric to get it to cover in some sort of uniform manner. The color did not turn out to be totally uniform but I like it. It sort of looks like sueded cotton. I used the Warhol Dress pattern for the dress but made it several inches longer.
For the guitar, I used a graphic I found on Google Images. I just blew it up on my printer until it was the size I wanted. For material, I used an old pink sleeping tank top. It was actually in my bag to go to the Salvation Army. I cut out the guitar and made a freezer paper stencil (basic instructions are in the Warhol dress pattern) to paint the inside details. I stuck the pink guitar to Steam a Seam Lite and ironed it to the dress. I then sewed around the guitar two times and then sewed "strings" on the guitar going from the tuning keys down to the bridge.
Then came the dress construction! I am not great at sewing with a knit but this time went better than before! Practice, practice, practice! I found it helped to loosen my presser foot tension quite a bit to help the fabric feed through smoothly. Sewing on the top band was a doozy, though. To make the band, the pattern instructs you to use two pieces of fabric and sew them together to make a long band, but my tank top didn't allow for that, so I cut two strips off of the bottom of the tank top, opened them up and sewed them together to make a long band. Thus I had more than just one seam but I don't think that made a difference. I just had a hard time sewing it together without everything getting all shifty all over the place!
After several tries, I finally sewed the gathers down around the neck edge with a 1/4 inch seam allowance, so they were set and could not move. Then I used Stitch Witchery Ultra Lite tape on the inside of the band to stick it to the dress before sewing. (You could probably use regular weight too, I just happened to have the ultra lite on hand!) This was a HUGE help. Why didn't I think of this sooner? It worked great. I ironed the band to where I wanted it and then sewed it all down with 2 rows of stitching. It is possible that I was having such a hard time sewing the band because my fabric was no where near a good quality knit. It was an old, thin tank top. So maybe that accounted for some of my problems. Or maybe I am just not so great with knits and need all the help I can get! Either way, this solution worked!
That dress is too cute!
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