So. You may or may not remember that both Charlotte and Katie wanted Elsa from Frozen dresses for their birthdays earlier in the year. Along with every other girl of Disney princess age in the World. I couldn't figure out how to attach cloaks and zips, so ended up making them from lycra. Charlotte wanted some red on hers. As you do. Exhibits A and B. Two beautiful and clean Elsa dresses.
Then I gave them to the girls. And they wore them! I know, anyone would think that's why I'd made them!
Last night they went to see 'Disney on Ice'. This meant (I'm told) that they had to dress up. Guess who they wanted to go as? I dread to think how many Elsas were in that audience. So, a couple of weeks the dresses were returned to Auntie Sandra for running repairs. I think the kindest way to put it was that the dresses had been loved to death. They obviously get plenty of wear out of them.
We had grubby marks...
Torn under arm seams...
Ripped bodice net...
And then there were the cloaks...
I had had doubts about using net, but this proved it. I did hear a rumour that at least one of the tears in the cloaks was from a bike riding incident, but we won't dwell on that.
I thought the best way forward would be to change the net for something more substantial. When searching for ideas I kept coming across organza. If you've been reading for a while you may recall how much I detest organza. Then I found this
and I fell in love. I NEEDED it. Sooo pretty. I ordered 3m. You can't have too much fabric in a cloak right? I also ordered some thin, semi-transparent lycra to replace the bodice and arm net.
I traced the pieces of the dresses I needed to replace. That was harder than I thought. Of course, for once in my life I'd actually thrown some traced pattern pieces out a couple of weeks before, and yes the Elsa patterns went with them. D'Oh!
Anyhoo, here are the final dresses.
Charlotte's still with her red bows.
How pretty?!! The fabric actually wasn't too bad to work with. It didn't fray as much as the last stuff I used and it seemed a lot more stable. I wouldn't say that it's made organza my first choice in future though. I even attempted a couple of rolled hems, as witnessed above. They're not brilliant, but I figure no one's going to be paying that much attention.
And here are the girls in action, so to speak.
There may have been lots of Elsas, but how many of them had such pretty cloaks?
On a side note, I was devastated when I started looking for fabric for the dresses. There's now a McCall's sewing pattern out!
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