My first pillowcase dress!

This week Master 5 has been invited to the 5th birthday party of a little girl in his Kindy class.  Not relishing the idea of braving the shops with 4 boys in toe just a week out from Christmas and not having time to wait for an online delivery, I decided to raid my fabric stash and create the girl an original Son-Shine and Lollypops dress.  

I have only ever made one dress before and that was a few weeks ago (I will have to wait to share that one in a few weeks for reason's that can not yet be revealed).  So, with very little experience under my belt, I set out to make a dress that would not only fit a 5 year old but would look beautiful and reasonably professional.  Did I mention that I do not have any dress patterns?  Buying a pattern would require venturing out into the world with 4 boys, something I try to avoid where possible.  I thought about buying a pattern online that gets sent via PDF to your inbox but when I took the time to find a dress I liked I discovered an electronic world of sewing tutorials and they give you easy to follow instructions for free.  Yes, FREE!!! I love that word.  

In the end I settled on a pillowcase dress - it looked like the easiest one at the time.  Despite its name, it's not actually made out of a pillowcase, although you could if you really wanted to.  I asked Master 5 to stand up straight for me and measured him up to get a general idea of sizing and how long to make the dress and wear the armholes should begin and then I got to ironing hems and sewing, ironing hems and sewing.  This routine continued until I finally had a nice, rectangular, pillowcase shaped dress.  All that was left to do was cut two lengths of ribbon, thread them through the top of the dress and sew in place.  I have to admit that my favourite part was sealing the ends of the ribbon with a lighter (or in my case the gas stove top) to stop them from fraying.  What can I say!  I like to play with fire!

Finally, with the dress finished, all I had to do was to get Master 5 to model it for me.  I don't know whether to be worried or not but he had no objections to wearing a dress at all.  He even posed nicely for me and when I showed him the photo's he was rather put out that I had only taken photo's of the dress, cropping out his face.  So I had to take another photo of him showing his face!  

Awwwww!  My beautiful Princess Prince!

So what do you think of my first ever pillowcase dress?  Do you think it's an acceptable present for a 5 year old girl?  I hope she likes it because she ain't getting anything else from us.