take that, Dora the Explorer!

I think I've mentioned before that Anna's favourite dress is a Dora the Explorer dress that was given to us amongst a big bag of hand-me-down clothes last year.  As much as I love hand me downs, I don't love licensed clothing very much so I had put it to the back of her wardrobe, planning to refashion it by appliqueing over the Dora picture.  But Anna discovered it before I did and has pretty much worn it on high frequency ever since.

And this is the offending garment:

For a licensed clothing garment it isn't so bad really, it only has one small picture of Dora and her trusty sidekick Boots on the front, it's red cotton and not a neon coloured polyester and it has some cute white crochet detail to the shoulder.  Plus it does this which is a favourite past time of late:

Perhaps why I dislike it so much is that her favourite garment isn't something I've sewn for her.  How dare she prefer a hand me down dress made in a sweatshop in China over something lovingly handmade by her own mother? So I decided to challenge Dora in the favourite dress category.

I let Anna choose the fabric from the stash, and she chose a pretty floral cotton drill which is probably a bit too heavy weight for the style but at least it will withstand a lot of wear and it helps give it a very flared finish due to its stiffness. 

Using McCalls 4817 which I bought one time when sewingpatterns.com had a 99c pattern sale - even with their exorbitant shipping charges the overall price was still cheaper than what I could get here in Australia, this is my challenger to the title of favourite dress:

The back has a little bow tie detail which is nice, but doing the gathers on those three tiers nearly drove me nuts - the bottom tier is 1.6m wide. In fact doing the gathers annoyed me so much I went out and bought a ruffle foot shortly after sewing this!  I made a size 2 pattern except I used the length of a size 4 pattern since Anna is a bit of bean pole and the fit is pretty good.

And how does one accessorise a pretty dress like this? With frilly socks and purple Converse high tops of course!

Anna has now declared this her favourite dress now and has worn it frequently over the last fortnight.  In fact Dora only gets a look in when this dress is on the clothesline so I'd say that's a win for me! Isn't this the face of a happy customer?

p.s still pregnant.  Sigh.