Sparkly, Striped, Pleated, Ruffled, and Ribboned Christmas Dress

First off I apologize for the 3 weeks of silence. Nothing exciting has happened with the goats, and I've been very busy sewing, but not sewing things I could blog about (at least not until after Christmas). There is one Christmas Project I've finished that I can tell you about, however, my little sister's sparkly, striped, pleated, ruffled, and ribboned Christmas Dress. I just finished it this weekend!
Since I made myself a Christmasy-red dress, I decided I ought to  make my sister a red Christmas dress too. On Black Friday, Joann's had all of their Christmas fabric 75% off, so I picked up 3 yards of this red and green striped cotton, with metallic threads running through it, to make her a Christmas dress. I had a really cute dress design in mind.

Then I realized that she wears the historically inspired dresses I make her more often than the contemporary ones I've made her. I asked her about this and she confirmed that she likes the historical dresses better. This made me happy because I was the same way at her age, (Thanks Mom and Gram for all the colonial and pioneer style dresses you made me!) though it did mean I had to go back to the drawing board on a design for her dress. So of course I went to Pinterest and looked through lots of 19th century girls' dresses. After considering my options and showing my ideas to my sister, We decided on a skirt to resemble the one on this dress from 1910.

I love how the stripes are vertical for most of the dress, but the stripes on the skirt ruffles are horizontal.

For the bodice we liked this dress from the 1860's.

The slightly diagonal pleating on the bodice looks really cool, and is a rather common design from this era.

Now yes, I realizes these dresses were made 50 years apart, but as the goal was just a historically inspired dress, and not a reproduction of one specific dress from one specific era, I figured it was fine, and my sister was pretty happy with the result. 

Look at that smile!

I don't have any really good pictures showing the pleating on the bodice front, but the pleating on the bodice turned out just how I wanted it to! Here's the front of the bodice ( I had to gather the neckline a little, by hand sewing a running stitch in the lining, as it gaped originally).

And here's the back!

I trimmed the yoke and sleeves with red velvet ribbon and some rather unique lace my sister stumbled across at a thrift store.

I cut the ruffles so that the top edge was the selvage, thus the gathering wouldn't make that edge too bulky. I then sewed more red velvet ribbon over my gathering stitches when I sewed the ruffles to the skirt, like this,

I love how this dress turned out! Now back to sewing Christmas gifts!

 Merry Christmas! As you get wrapped up with preparations, don't forget to remember why we celebrate Christmas, because God gave the world the first, and best, Christmas gift 2000 years ago.