'Ten minute' is a title, not a guaranteed duration

And for my next trick . . . .

My second sewing project was the "10-minute Onesie Dress" from Prudent Baby.

It was probably closer to a 45-minute Onesie Dress With A Two Hour Intermission During Construction, but I did at least finish it in a day.  More on the making and the "After" pictures after the jump.

I first had to re-learn to thread the machine which seemed easier the first time (a week ago or whatever).  Then my spool kept flying off the spindle. And the thread came unthreaded like 4 times. Annoying.

The instructions were pretty well written.  I am realizing that trying to adopt a hobby involving so much ironing was probably a mistake, but oh well. And I'm still struggling to cut, iron, and stitch in straight lines - advice appreciated.  I bought some inexpensive Wal-Mart onesies (I know, I know) and chose some bunny toile I picked up on sale at Jo-Ann.  (Hi: I live in the 'burbs, how are you? I promise I also have some way hip fabrics from way hip fabric sources, too.)

The two biggest challenges for this project: 1) pulling the bobbin thread to ruffle the skirt and 2) sewing the skirt onto the onesie - which, yeah, is sort of the crux of the project, so I'm saying the project's biggest challenge was the project. Whatever.  The bobbin thread didn't seem to pull very simply and then it was hard to uniformly ruffle the skirt. The final product definitely has a bit more bulk in certain areas than in others.  I also probably made the skirt a bit too full.

I think I managed to place the skirt at an appropriate height on the onesie - I was worried about ending up with something ghastly ill-proportioned.  I don't have a good special fabric pen thingymado to draw straight lines on the onesie - not the end of the world, might have made the finishing easier, don't know.  This was the first time I used some of my shiny colorful pins, too. 

My biggest oops, though, came from not being careful enough to hide the basting stitch used to ruffle the skirt within the attachment process. For the next one - and there will have to be a take-two - I'll definitely watch that really carefully. I might be able to carefully pull out that basting stitching, but I haven't tried it yet.

Definitely a good project for beginning seamstresses.  Probably better yet for people with patience.  Here's the little miss enjoying/not noticing or caring much about mommy's hard work.

Oh, and the last suggestion: make sure you buy up a size or so, or find some large-running onesies.  I didn't factor in the length of onesie that would be lost in the construction .  My girl is tall already - so this thing barely snaps closed right now.  I doubt it will make it to Easter.