short summer series: a miniature bride

I may have mentioned it before: my little nieces love absolutely nothing more than dressing up.

For the oldest one this means imitating her favorite Disney princess of the week.
For her little sister, it usually implies putting on her hot pink rain boots ( your guess is as good as mine on why she does that..), wrapping herself in whichever kind of fabric is at hand as "a dress" and skip off to chase the cat. So, when I had to think about birthday gifts, it wasn't a difficult decision: dress-up clothes!




I've shown you some before over here, and this time I made them a wedding dress!

I began with a (new) shirt in my niece's size, and an old dress-shirt from me I didn't like anymore.

I began by separating the "skirt" from the top of my shirt.

snip!!

That is going to make the skirt of the wedding dress. But all alone it would be a pretty boring dress-skirt, so I digged through my fabric stash until I found a bit of semi-sheer white curtain fabric.

just a bit of extra material!

So, basically I'm giving my nieces old rags for their birthdays.... But let's spice it all up a little to cover that fact, shall we?

First, I took the ( already hemmed, whoo!) curtain fabric and the shirt fabric together to make a skirt, by adding a good load of elastic to the top.

ruffle away!

And the best bit of using two layers of fabric is that you can hide the raw edges in the middle, where nobody is going to notice them. :)

So, with the elastic in place, the skirt was pretty much ready!

I'm almost hearing wedding bells here

As you might be able to see in the pictures, the curtain fabric is open in the front, due to the fact that it was already hemmed like that, and I figured I would quite like it like that.

All that was left to do now was attaching the shirt to the skirt with a nice zigzag, and a wedding dress was born!

luckily the flower of the neckline match the coloring of the skirt..

As a bonus I made a veil by sewing an extra bit of the curtain fabric to a piece of elastic, and adding some pearl decoration to the bottom.

just add some elastic! 

gotta have pearls on your wedding! 

So, that was basically a wedding dress with veil for 3 euros, and a good hour of work? I wish all weddings were easy like that!

tadaaa!!

The best thing about it though was driving with all the dressing clothes to my parents' house where the nieces were staying over, and seeing how they quite literally dove head first into the pile of clothes. And even though this particular dress was meant for my youngest niece, it only took 5 minutes before the eldest had wiggled herself into it ( but by that time, my youngest niece had put on het rain boots and was chasing the cat, so she didn't mind)

And here's the blushing bride! She married her stuffed dog, me, the cat, her granddad and herself that day, so I'm guessing that in the future we may have to explain the rules of polygamy to her...

Can't go too big with a wedding bouquet!

But for now Im just quite happy to see how much fun they have with basically my old scraps of fabric :)

Hope you liked it!