Dragon Dress!

So, first of all, Ed Emberley is awesome, and I've already used his frog fabric from his cloud9 collection Happy Drawing in a quilt a while back. (It's at the bottom of this post, the one with a very imaginative title...) The frogs to me are the quintessential Ed Emberley animal, but probably that's because I spent a lot of time pouring over his drawing book and recreating frogs during my childhood.

We had the animal book as kids, but when I had my own kids, my sister gave us a few more, only one of which I found to put in this picture. I suspect the children of hiding them.

But I also bought the dragons, because it is amazing. And finally made it up into a dress for my daughter who is very much not into pink and/or floral prints.

and then I swore to never do a gathered skirt again

I only bought 1.5 yards in that way I have of buying fabric without consulting patterns first. So, I resorted to a contrast band to give it length. And with all the red I couldn't resist the contrasting zipper, could I? But I ran out of red before I got to the arm hole bindings, so they are a completely different shade of green. And one of course, I have no matching thread for, so obviously, I sewed the binding on with red thread, which shows through in places, but only if you look REALLY CLOSE. But, well, lessons learned!

And the mistakes are generally small enough to overlook. ;)

And the fabric is wonderfully soft!

I also have a few prints from Happy Drawing Too, though I haven't cut into them yet.

This one's my favorite:

Now I hope to get some more quilt work done before I cave to the demands of the other child for a dress of her own.

Although, speaking of Cloud9, I feel like I need to put in an unsolicited word for Mixteca: It's amazing, it's seriously like nothing I've ever seen before, I've been showing it around to friends as an amazing example of fabric design. And the colors are great. And everyone should buy some (I have the toucans, and the dots are on my list; sadly, the fabric budget stands between me and the whole collection). Brenda carries it at Pink Castle Fabrics.