I was instantly intrigued when I saw the One Hour Sundress post on From and Igloo.  One hour, huh?  It looked simple enough and was really quite cute.  I could imagine myself as a young girl, wearing this sort of dress while out running errands with my mom or, even better, getting ice cream!  The dress just feels like summer.

My first attempt (teased about at the end of this post) didn’t quite turn out right.  It was a touch too small for Ella, so I changed my measurements and made a second one — this time for my niece, Abby, for her 3rd birthday.  I wanted to use seersucker,  but the seersucker prints at my fabric store were … icky.  A couple of aisles over was the Tutti Frutti collection.  It was seersucker-like, loud, crazy and covered with things like monkeys and strawberries.  Seems like a 3-y-o girl to me.  After hemming and hawing for a long while (choosing a super-bright pattern for a strawberry blonde is not easy), I decided (with help from Mom… thanks!) on an ice cream print.  There was NO WAY I was going to pair two of those prints for the suggested way of making the dress, so I decided instead to use one fabric and break it up with some grosgrain ribbon.  By the way, I think it really says something about a fabric when you “break it up” with atomic pink accents.  Wow.

After making the dress, I saw an additional tutorial on From An Igloo on making a matching dress for a Barbie doll.  Since we are not yet to the Barbie phase, I thought Abby’s bunny, Ariel, could use a new dress.  Rather than follow the instructions on the Barbie tutorial (why do it the easy way?), I decided to simply re-calculate the size with the original tutorial.  Minus silly mistakes on my behalf, it worked rather well.

Special thanks to Ella and George for modeling!

Can the dress be made in an hour?  If you are not me, and you do not make mistakes like constantly sewing the incorrect pieces together, yes, I think it could be done in an hour.  The tutorial is comprehensive and has helped me to learn more about measurements and creating my own garment.  For Ella’s dress, I think I will be using patriotic prints.  This dress is just asking to go to a 4th of July parade!