Embroidered Blue Baby Dress I

Some time back I took yet another class from Jeannie Baumeister of Old Fashioned Baby in which we made a darling baby dress from her pattern Best Embroidered Baby Clothes One. The dress is made from blue batiste with ecru lace and embroidery.

Jeannie generally uses Anchor embroidery floss, so the ecru color is just slightly different from DMC's version of the color.  This dress has little pintucks, all made by hand. The pintucks aren't deep enough to make any gathers in the fabric, but exist just for the decoration. Notice the little bullion roses and the feather stitching. These items seem to be Jeannie's trademark, and they make the dresses look so lovely and sweet.

Also notice the lace insertion that is stitched onto the fabric by hand with Point de Paris, or pin stitch as we Americans call it. The fabric is not cut out behind the lace, so it looks more solid this way.

I also made a sweet little bonnet to match the dress, with silk ribbons, of course. And this is all washable.
 
The laces on this dress are fairly light in color for ecru laces. Later on I'll show you another blue baby dress I made with ecru lace that is quite a bit darker. 

Now for likes and dislikes:

I love working with batiste as it's fairly tightly woven and doesn't ravel much at all. Still, I do make french seams on this type of garment and finish every single edge so there can't be any fraying. Even though the fabric and laces are expensive, they wash very well. I tend to get these dresses back from my daughter with little beige blotches on them from milk burps or heaven knows what else. I just soak the dresses in a pasty mixture of Oxy Clean and Kirkland detergent (from Costco), then wash. The stains always come right out and the dresses all look new (after a good session with the iron!)

Dislikes? I honestly can't think of one. Jeannie's patterns all have good instructions and are easy to follow. The embroidery designs are simple and sweet, and are infinitely variable.

I may try to make some of these dresses in Imperial Batiste, which is a polyester/cotton mix. Very few of the young moms in my family has bonded with her iron as I have. Has anyone out there tried this?I don't imagine the Point de Paris will work well on polycotton, but have never tried it. It may work better by machine.