Easter Dresses...and a hat

Easter dresses...what memories and what fun to make. This year's were a little extravagant for my simple taste, but I found the pale green taffeta like fabric way back in January at the remnant sale of a great, but little pricey, fabric store. I added some lavender ribbon with green scroll work in it to match(which by the way cost me 3X as much as the fabric because who can beat 75% off). After a couple of months culling ideas here are the end results:

For Sophia's I loosely used this pattern. By loosely, I mean I used the pattern pieces to cut out the bodice and sleeves, which I still altered a bit. I dropped the waist and made the skirt a balloon skirt by making the underskirt smaller than the top(in length and circumference) and rather than hemming them both I gathered the top to fit the underskirt. Make sense?

Clara's is loosely based on a Burda pattern (3025--can't find it on their site). Really again I just used it for the bodice, which I decided to make it tie at the shoulders rather than button at the back. By making it fully lined, it sewed up really fast and all I had to do was turn it right side out. I alternated fabrics for what was on the outside. Since I lined it, I added an underskirt that would show. I did 6 pin tucks with lavender thread at the bottom of the white underskirt. Then on the top green one I gathered it in 3 places (middle and at 1/4 and 3/4 between the side hems). At the gathers I added little purple ribbon flowers (Sophia has 2 at her neckline--I really wanted to use those to make barrettes for Clara, but she really wanted flowers on her dress). In the end I also took a scrap piece of the white and ran a bunch of pin tucks across to add to the neck line, kind of like an insert, because it was hanging too low to even look good (Sophia's hand is covering it up). Now totally irrelevant to Easter, but something I created: this hat. No special pattern, just 10 rows of k2,p2 and than alternating k2/p2 every 2 rows to make the bauble effect. Simple decrease of subtracting 1 every round of when to do the double knit (ie hats 60 stitches around: first time every 12th stitch do a decrease, next time every 11, etc--I know there are better explanations out there somewhere). I just love this hat though. I love the color, the cuteness and I'm sad winter is over because I'm pretty sure it won't fit next year.