500 Years of Adventures: Sew It Sunday: Belle Dress

This year for Lissy's first Halloween I decided that she was going to be Belle. This stemmed from a combination of my love of the movie Beauty & the Beast and a picture that I saw on Pinterest. For more pictures and a recap of Halloween you can see my post here.

My inspiration for making this dress was a little dress that we got for her right after she was born where the top of the dress was a little onsie that they had sewn a sack to the bottom of to make a little dress.

Supplies

Here are my supplies:0-3 month onsie-I got this on clearance at JCPenney & loved that it had the little ruffles at the top.
Yellow Satin-My mom got this for me with a coupon at JoAnn's. I didn't end up using anywhere near the whole yard, but I kind of played my measurements by ear so I couldn't tell you for sure how much I ended up using.
Flower & Headbands-The flower was on clearance for $.50 at WalMart. The headbands are the child's size from the craft sections at WalMart. I only ended up using one of the headbands. They came in a three pack and I included them both in the photo because my original plan was to use tulle (which I bought in two different tones of yellow/gold) to make a tutu to go over the dress. I ended up deciding that I liked the simpler look without it.

Pinned ruffles: top view

To cut my satin I tripled the width across my onsie at the point where I wanted it to sit. I ended up deciding to put it at about her belly button so that I had the option to put leggings under it if it was chilly. (It did end up being chilly, but we didn't end up going out, so we never had to use leggings.) By tripling the width I allowed for the skirt to fit all of the way around plus have some ruffle to it.

This was my practice pinning before I was actually ready to cut or sew. This was how I know that tripling would be enough. (Originally I was going to do four times the width but that was just too much ruffle.) You can see from the next picture (below) how exactly I folded it to get my ruffles. I tried to mock the soft ruffles of Belle's dress from the movie, which is why I folded it rather than gathering it.

In order to make sure that the skirt fit onto the onsie correctly I first sewed the edges of the satin together to make a tube. I then slid it over the onsie. To make this work I put the onsie right side out and the satin wrong side out. Then I slid the tube over the top of the onsie so that the snaps at the crotch were sewing.

Before pinning the ruffles to the onsie I placed three other pins: one to hold the seam in the satin to the center of the onsie and one in each side seam of the onsie to make sure that I had the skirt centered around the onsie.

Once the ruffles were all pinned I sewed around the onsie using a 1/2" seam. I rolled the bottom hem and sewed that as well. And that was it! Easy peasy!!!