Empowered

You might think that title is referring to some spiritual quality, but today it has to do with crafting. After my confidence was boosted after learning to gather fabric and learning to sew a stretchy stitch, I have now progressed to making garments.
Baby doll garments.

They are like regular clothes, but in miniature.
Baby Rosy, shown here in her pink dress, needed some new clothes and I was up for the challenge. So I gave the pink dress a quick look over, looked at some patterns online and then decided to wing it with no pattern. Too cheap to print them off.
So I eye-balled, it came up with a pretty decent looking dress (for my first try ever). Professional sewers, do not read further, you may gag.
First off, my first button-holing experience was a bit dramatic leaving the area around the button hole a bit frayed looking. Overall however, I think it turned out okay.
New techniques I used: button-hole foot & stitch, finishing a raw edge without a serger, and sewing in a circle for sleeves. All very interesting and not nearly as overwhelming as I thought they would be.
I finished the dress in about 4 hrs, but next time it won't take so long. At least an hour of that was trying to figure out how to get my button-hole stitch to work properly. Thank you Brother manual for such good pictures.
Oh, and it turns out that baby doll dress sleeves are too small to fit over the end of my machine's sewing platform thingy, so I had to hand-stitch them on. Still, they turned out fairly well too. Although I'm not sure they would hold up if I were to wash it in my washing machine, they will hold up okay being played with.
I wish I could say the same for my first button hole. It may not last, but if it totally falls apart, I will just sew on some velcro strips, since I think my 2 year old would appreciate them better. I've already caught her trying to rip the dress off while almost ripping the single button off in the process.
Velcro is probably in this dress's future.
My final quirk that will be fixed on my next dress. I forgot to cut a neck scoop. Look at how the neck portion stretches almost straight across the poor dolls neck. If this were a real dress, I guarantee my kids would hate it. So note to self, next time cut a neck scoop.
And there you have it, my first garment of sorts.....in miniature. Look how happy Baby Rosy looks.

By the way, do you recognize that polka dot fabric Martha, it is from your blessing of scraps you donated to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.