xoxo Grandma: Nautical Dress - Blaverry Ansley Pattern Tour

Today I'm part of a blog pattern tour. That basically means a bunch of different bloggers are trying out the exact same pattern in different ways. Fun idea, right? The pattern being tested is the Ansley twirl dress pattern from Blaverry. The fun thing about this pattern is it gives you a lot of different design options. This week, Blaverry is offering a discount on this pattern so if you like cute, new patterns and want a discount, go to the end of this post for a code to save you some money.

I had my almost 11 month old granddaughter in mind for this cute dress. I made the 12 month size for her. She's in the 95 percentile for height, so the dress had to be long enough for her. After consulting with my daughter we decided to make a dress with a straight hem and the elbow length sleeves with the cuff. I really appreciate that this pattern is packed full of a lot of design choices, so we could tailor it exactly how we wanted.

My first choice was what fabric to use. For Mother's Day, one of the gifts I received was three nautical fabrics and some laser cut anchor buttons. If you sew, you'll agree with me that this was an extremely thoughtful gift! I wanted to use these items to make something classic. When I saw a request for volunteers to test a new pattern, I hoped that one of these fabrics would look fabulous with it. I ended up using two of these fabrics, the ship chambray fabric accented with the rope fabric.

The dress sewed up easily, but there were a few details of the sewing process I'm going to show below because I like things spelled out a little more in the instructions.

First the tab detail: I wanted it to look more finished. To do this, I only sewed one seam to the bodice and then tucked under the bottom seam and sewed it by hand.

With the cuff, I turned one seam under 3/8 of an inch and ironed it. Then I sewed the edge not turned up to the sleeve.

The final step was to hand sew the ironed cuff edge to the seam. This way your cuff looks finished if you choose to fold the cuff up.

At this point, I had a few choices to make and believe me, this pattern is full of tons of choices.

Choice one: cuffs up or down.

Choice two: cuffs with buttons or without buttons.

Choice three: large button ( see photo above) or smaller button (see photo below).

To solve this dilemma, I took the above two photos and sent them to my daughter to let her decide. After all, this dress was designed for her little girl and I wanted my daughter to like it. Here's my adorable granddaughter modeling her new dress:

Her mom stated that the only way to keep her still in one place was to let her pull out her books. She's a girl after my heart.

Here's what my daughter chose: cuffs up, one small button, basic straight hem, no collar, 3/4 length sleeves and bias tape to finish off the dress. It's little long but she's got one more month until she's supposed to be a 12 mo. size. Oh well, this dress will just fit her a little longer than most of her clothes. Another great thing about this dress is that it can even be worn as a tunic once it gets too short to wear as a dress, because it is so roomy.

If you'd like to purchase this fun pattern go to BLAVERY. Use the following coupon code "ILOVEBLAVERY10" at checkout for a 10% off during this blog tour.