One cannot be the Dragon Mistress at the Dragon Ball without a dress to wear.
Well. One can. We are all about the feminism and free choice in clothing options at Casa McDowell, and I can frequently be found pleading with Frances to just try on the boy’s jeans, or let me try a boy’s jeans pattern for her. “But you like them!” I say. “They’re baggy and loose and that’s just what you like! All of the girls’ jeans are skinnies! You HATE skinnies.”
“They’re boy pants, Mom,” she says, and that’s that.
So one can be the Dragon Mistress at the Dragon Ball while wearing bermuda shorts and a caftan, if that is what one wants to wear, but when one wants a dress, well then, the Dragon Mistress needs a dress.
Even when said Dragon Mistress decides she needs that dress a mere week before the Ball in question, and she happens to be spending that week at her Dad’s house, and when her seamstress is in the midst of assembling a small army of dragon t-shirts.
Fortunately for me, I found this lovely cotton print at Fabricland for $4/m. And even more fortunately, Frances has recently decided that she is perhaps not completely opposed to all prints–that it may be acceptable, from time to time, to wear something not a solid.
So a $4/m print in one of her favourite colours was an easy decision.
The pattern came out of the Summer 2015 Ottobre magazine–the Daisy dress, so I’d already paid for it. I have about a metre of the print leftover. That makes the effective cost of this dress about $10.
Here she is, presiding over her dragonish domain, and looking pretty fabulous if I do say so myself.
The dress was lined with white voile left over from the Math Skirt.
The dress pattern was easy-peasy. Three pleats, yoke and skirt pieces, lining, bam, done. The instructions were clear and followed a logical order. I used a combination of sewing and serging to put it together, and the hems were first serged (to make them even) and then stitched up once with a very narrow top-stitch.
If you hadn’t guessed already, you’ll be seeing more Ottobre projects here in the future.
Zoopolis 
It was the perfect dress for the Dragon Ball. Well done mom!
Thank you. 🙂
Great pattern, and I love the way it looks on her. It looks, sadly, as if skinnies are the thing in that age group just now. Luckily my grandkid can wear them, but she is going to be pretty cold, come October. If you have enough fabric left, I always used to make shorts or bloomers to go under skirts so the girls could hang upside down, or whatever. Dresses were ‘in’ back then.
I think if I made Frances bloomers she might kill me. But yes. The situation with storebought girls’ clothing is not good, even for a kid who fits in their sizing charts.
Very nice. And quite relieved nobody lost her head over it all!
Nope. Just in the pictures. 😉