I’m not sure why Evelyn likes my Baseball Staple Dress so much. Maybe because she knows her Nana and Baba like baseball a lot? Regardless of the reason, when I was sorting through my scrap bin to sew her some summer clothes, I knew that the last beloved bits of this silly fabric needed to be sewn up for her.

I used vintage Simplicity 9238 from 1971 for the dress and bloomers. There wasn’t quite enough fabric to fit the flare of the dress pattern piece so I inset a contrast strip at the side. The bloomers are oddly long but they ride up her legs into one giant puff which may not look cute on an adult but frankly anything is cute on a 2-year-old so I’m not going to try and fix it.

I did make one gaff when sewing the dress – somehow I lost the collar pieces while finishing up the dress. And then as soon as I gave up looking for them (thinking perhaps I never cut them in the first place since the dress had been sitting, cut out for a couple months) and I went ahead and sewed in the neck facing, my cat stood up and there were the collar pieces under her fluffy butt. So I decided to go ahead and sew up the collar and topstitch it on instead. I think it looks intentional, so pretend I never told you it was a mistake, okay? (The red fabric was also a scrap remnant so there wasn’t enough to pattern match the collar, in case you were wondering).

I sewed the top and bloomers in a size 3 (the size I had the pattern in, and 1 size larger than Evelyn now) so that she can get a couple of summers worth of wear from them. This approach means that most of what she’s wearing this summer is too big, but it also means I have next summer’s clothes sorted already. #lazyparenting

So what do you think about the matchy matchy outfits? Sickeningly cute? Yeah, I agree. But that’s not gonna stop me from wearing them!