Rachel's Baptism Dress

I decided even before we were blessed with our first baby girl, that I wanted to make their blessing dresses and their baptism dresses. These are such significant events in their lives, I wanted to make it a little more special by making them something with my own hands, rather than going and buying something from the store. So, although I'm sure I could have found dresses that were more elaborately and more professionally made, I hope that my girls will look at their dresses and know that their mother made them with her own hands out of her great love for them.

For Rachey's dress, I wanted to make it "girly cute," meaning that I wanted it fancy and a little more formal than a regular church dress, but I also didn't want it to look like a little white prom dress. I still wanted to capture her cute little 8 year old personality and let her stay a little girl. So that was my objective with this one, make it beautiful, and white, and special, but keep it simple and little-girly cute.

On the bodice, I added little ribbon embellishments and flowers to dress up the simple design. The fabric I chose, was a nice simple white that has a little sheen to it, but not a lot. The fabric is machine washable, which I had to look very hard to find, but I wanted her to be able to wear it to church afterwards, and not just on her baptism day!

I dressed up the waistband by adding two rows of ribbon, and a satin rose which is simply pinned on so that it can be taken off when laundering. Here she is wearing her baptism necklace and beaming on her special day.
The back was just a simple ribbon bow. To add to the fullness of the skirt, I added two layers of gathered tulle. Then, to dress up the skirt a little, and to add that playfulness of a little girl, I added a slightly gathered ruffle. She loved it...that night she spinned around and around to watch the full skirt ruffle around her. Too cute. Here she is trying it on for the first time! She was so excited, because it was the night before, and she had no idea that I had made it. I did all my sewing in the middle of the night in order to surprise her. It was worth all of those hours of lost sleep.