one ice cream (dress) to go please

After feeling a little discouraged with the amount of time and effort to took to decipher the robe pattern, I reconsidered the amount of money I am willing to spend on paper patterns (very little) and took myself to Peppermint Stitches, the delightful quilting store down the road from me. It's a feel-good store, where I usually spend a lot of time browsing and dreaming. More importantly they sell Oliver + S patterns and I seem to remember other people writing on their blogs (really spell check, you take offence to that word on a blog ?!? would blogi be better ? anyway) about just how lovely their instructions were. So, in short, I paid the 24.95 (even ordering it in the US and having it shipped to Australia wouldn't have made it much cheaper) for the Ice Cream Social dress and carried it proudly home. After spending that much on the pattern, I had to search my remnant pile right away and came up with 2 kinda matching cotton prints from my favourite Spotlight line 'Spots and Stripes'.

It took my 2 days (some 30 odd days less then the robe) and a lot less worrying and stressing and here we have it: the ICE CREAM SOCIAL DRESS. It fits and all (I shortened it a little).

My V's at the collar and on top of the pockets are not as neat as they could be, but in all fairness I might avoid them in the next dress all together. They do add a nice touch, but it was a bit of an effort to get them okay looking (also I used every single scrap of the pink stripey fabric, so I had no do overs).

I also have a little mistake on this side where the pink stripes didn't quite meet seamlessly on the bottom panel, but again, it is very small and hardly noticeable. The instructions were brilliant. I have read the some people found them too wordy, but because everything was spelled out I could work on it in the evening when the kids were asleep without worrying that I was going to miss something really important :-)