A Jiggle Jam Warhol Dress

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! 

The clever girl loved the dress.  It was super comfortable and lightweight.  She said it was a good dancing dress!  She certainly proved that to be true at Jiggle Jam.  The little one danced and danced the entire day.  What fun!