Carolina's First & Second Homemade Pageant Dresses

This was her first time to be in a pageant.   It was Kai's 2nd time.
Carolina won Little Miss Queen of Trousdale County.
This was my first time to ever make a smocked dress.  I made it for her Easter dress.  2011

The Little Miss Trousdale County beauty pageant is next weekend.

So I was looking back through old posts and realized I hadn't written a post on Carolina's pageant dresses.

I got the idea for this dress from something I had seen on Etsy.com

Here is a similar video to what I watched to learn how to make a dress. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BGxyQE1VdA

She got 2nd runner up and loved the taste of that trophy!
This was 2012

We didn't participate in any pageants in 2013
Last year (2014) she wore a dress I got at a thrift store.

Pretty little princess!

Knot Dress

I got another good picture of Kai wearing her dress. 

This month over at Project Run and Play the challenge of the month was this adorable 

Knot Dress pattern.

When I saw this pattern I immediately knew I wanted to make a lightweight jacket or cardigan, and this is why.

There is this gorgeous little keyhole in the back.

I just thought it would be beyond divine to have the dress fabric show through the keyhole of the jacket, which coincidentally is held together only by the knots.

Plus, even though it's spring it's never warm enough to go without a cardigan on Easter Sunday.

I wanted this to be her Easter dress, so I just had to make it.

This gave me the perfect opportunity to make her that ruffle bustle dress I've been wanting to make her too.  I also wanted to make an open backed jacket for it when I got around to making her a ruffle bustle dress.  I got to do both in this project, and we both love how it turned out.

I used the same pattern for the cardigan, but used a new tutorial for drafting my sleeve pattern.

Here it is at Leena's.com.

I thought about cutting the jacket to be the length of the dress, but she likes the way it looks with her cowgirl boots and jeans too, so I left it this length.

 Here is the dress without the cardigan.

 Now Carolina wants me to make her one.  Don't know if I'll have time.  We'll find out.

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