Last Sep­tem­ber, I was able to vis­it some of the girls I babysat for while I was in col­lege. These girls were some of the first peo­ple to receive my one-of-a-kind quilt­ed hand­bags. In fact, I can remem­ber bring­ing over the fab­ric squares to their house, so that they could design their purses!

Now a few years lat­er, they’re design­ing more than just hand­bags! This time, I asked them to design dresses!

The girls were extreme­ly enthu­si­as­tic and drew lots of dress­es (most of which were puffy & very spark­ly princess dresses)!

I planned on cre­at­ing and fin­ish­ing the dress­es last Novem­ber for Christ­mas gifts.

But unfor­tu­nate­ly, that didn’t happen!

I fin­ished two dress­es back in Novem­ber, but I hat­ed the results! (I tried using pink fab­rics from my fab­ric stash and end­ed up with dress­es that weren’t very puffy and looked too much like cos­tumes.) It wasn’t until recent­ly I decid­ed to pick up the dress­es and fin­ish what I started!

Not only did I want the dress­es to mir­ror the girls’ draw­ings, but I also want­ed to cre­ate dress­es that could be worn in pub­lic (maybe)!

I end­ed up cut­ting off the bot­tom half of the orig­i­nal dress­es and replac­ing the skirts with cham­pagne & hot pink tulle.

Since I knew I’d send them off for Valentine’s Day, I decid­ed to make a heart cutout t‑shirt instead of a dress for the youngest girl.