Christmas Crafting Part 2 - Two Mini Pennies

Since the Child still hasn't grown that much lately she doesn't particularly need any new clothes, but I thought a new dress for Christmas would be nice.  Browsing Flickr one morning with the Child next to me, we saw this dress and immediately she asked me to make her one like it.  So with some help from Fiona, who made it, I tracked down the fabric and ordered a metre from Dots n Stripes (it's still in stock!!).

I was originally going to copy the inspiration dress exactly but when I found out that my Niece will be with us for Christmas I could not resist and decided to make coordinating dresses and felt the solid red (from KitschyCoo) went better with both fabrics.  My Niece has a longstanding Hello Kitty obsession and I had mentioned to her in the summer that I had seen some lovely Hello Kitty jersey so it was obvious which fabric to choose for her!  This came from Stone Fabrics, and is lovely but I'm pretty sure it wasn't £14.60 per metre when I bought it! 

The pattern is the fab Mini Penny Pinafore pattern from KitschyCoo.  I have made this a few times before and it is *almost* as popular with the Child as the Skater, but not quite!  I constructed the dresses on my overlocker and just used my normal machine for the hems and neckline.  They were so quick to make, I made both of them in one evening while watching television (Portlandia, if you are interested!).

 One of the great things about the pattern is that because the front and back panels are quite slim, you can squeeze this out of a relatively small piece of fabric.  The first top below was made out of offcuts from my first Renfrew and is lovely and Christmassy for this time of year (although it does get worn all year round!). The second top and the dress were both made with fabrics from KitschyCoo, Zoe recently made her beautiful girl a dress out of the yellow fabric which looks fab!