Gabi's popover dress, or Measure Twice, Cut Once

When I received an email from Quilter's Haven to say that they had new fabric in that was based on artwork from Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I knew I had to go and get some for my favorite toddler.

I hunted around the internets and found this free download for the "popover" dress from Oliver + S, which I thought was really cute.

I printed it out, pasted the pieces together, cut my fabric, sewed up the dress, and went, "Huh. That's REALLY little." I got out the ruler and the size 4 length was supposed to be 20 inches. Mine was 14. Um, that's not going to fit.

Turns out my printer and Preview were trying to be helpful and resize the patterns to print vertically. Thanks, technology! That would be the tiny pattern on the left, and the real one on the right. FAIL.

Fortunately, I'd seen this blog post about cutting the pieces from HALF of the folded fabric, which meant that I had enough left over to make the second dress once I had downloaded Adobe Reader, wrestled with my printer, and printed out the Right Darned Size.

The good things:
 - The dress came out much better the second time (sizing aside): my seams were neater, I avoided any pinning pitfalls, and the curves are better.

The bad things:
 - I have two dresses. Well, I guess that's not really bad, as I'm sure Miss Gabi will find a doll or teddy or unsuspecting cohort to put the smaller dress on. I rather overzealously made the size 4 size, for a 4-year-old (she's 2 1/2), but she's tall. It can be a floor-length gown this year, just right next year, and a squeeze when she's 4. Or something.

It's going in the mail tomorrow (and I had a blast wrapping it)! There's a fair amount of fabric (in funny scrappy shapes, obviously), but I'm sure I'll come across a fun project. The original plan was a matching bag and/or hat, but since it took me the extra 3 weeks to sort out the pattern size, I want to get it to her so she can wear it a few times before summer's over!