Loads and Loads of Tulle

My sister had her heart set on dressing up her flower girls in tutu’s for her June wedding. When my mom put the kibosh real tutus (we can’t have messy little girl, bellies hanging over their waistbands in church!) they compromised with these adorable little ballerina dresses from Target, which at $20 a piece are pretty hard to beat. Unfortunately, they only make these dresses up to a size 5T, which won’t fit on the 6 year-old ring leaders of the gaggle of flower girls.

So thrilled to see the battle of the tutus come to and end, I volunteered to replicate the dresses in a size 6 for the older girls. Before cutting into the 5 yards of while polyester shantung stacked in the corner of my bedroom I bought some inexpensive poly/cotton seersucker to test out all the adaptations I am going to have to make on the pattern to make it look just like the Target dresses. Using Butterick 5458 as a building block I added a layer of tulle (just you wait for the real ones, they’ll have 3 layers!) and added buttons down the back. The tulle on the dress I’m replicating was a full circle the length of the dress, which was probably the most challenging part of the project. I pulled out my geometry skills (thanks Mr. Wellman!) and made a compass from a thumb tack, a string, and a Sharpie to draw full circles big enough to make 27 inch long skirt. After a whole lot of gathering and a pretty steep learning curve, this is the little dress I ended up with on one of our flower girls in training.