Birthday Tea Dress

This is the dress I made for my daughter's 1st birthday.  I wanted something that would be a pretty little tea dress & found a pattern for a tunic top with a cute front pleat and went for it.  I added extra length to make it into a dress:

I love how the sleeves fold up to show the contrasting fabric and are accented with a little bow detail:

And the easy open back, which I made even easier by using snaps instead of buttons.  This made it simpler to take off after it got covered with birthday cake:

The pattern used was the Savanni Tunic of Ottobre Design's Summer 2010 issue.  The overall design of it is straightforward, but the directions seemed to over complicate things a lot.   Maybe it's because I'm a visual person, but my one big gripe about this (and most of the other Ottobre patterns really) is that they just cram all the instructions into a tiny paragraph with no illustrations.  And maybe one or two posed pics of the item, but never a total view, so you can't refer to that for help.  Not very user-friendly.  So if you're brand new to sewing....good luck.

I accidentally stitched the top & bottom layers together wrong the first time because I thought I was following the directions despite my crafter's sense telling me it wasn't right.  And this was after reading & re-reading it several times.  Ugh.  So ultimately I find myself just assembling it as it makes sense to me instead of using their steps.  Once I finished it I also felt like the front was too blah, so I added another button & bow.

Here's how it looked on (I didn't think to take a better picture!):

Perfect for the party & that's what counts!

Sharing this with my FAVE LINK PARTIES too so check them out HERE!