Making something special and close to my heart

I'm working on something special in true "Jennifer fashion", at the last minute! Tuesday is my middle girl's 5th birthday and even though she is afraid of all animals big or small she thinks she is a cowgirl! For Christmas she wanted a cowgirl outfit, horse toys, etc. When she plays it usually will involve cowgirls or horses. So for her birthday I had the idea to make her a cowgirl themed dress.


I bought the Sienna Dress pattern a long time ago after reading Lil Blue Boo's blog. She is amazing and her stuff is so cute! So I thought this would be the perfect one to make this outfit with. Lil Blue Boo also gives great tutorials on freezer paper stenciling and embellishing your fabric which I will be doing to this dress.

The fabric is a load of pink knit fabric I scored at a garage sale for less than 50cents! (SWEET!) When I went to the craft store to get some paint and spray bottle (per Lil Blue Boo's instructions) I found that Tulip now makes spray fabric paint. Nice!

So I'm up to the point where I have all my pieces cut out. Now I'm embellishing each of my pieces. I've put a cowgirl on a running horse on the front and she didn't turn out too bad for my first try at stenciling. I probably should have practiced on a scrap piece first but I'm impatient and I'm on a time crunch. =) Now that she is dry I've found that the Tulip paint will make your fabric a little hard but I'm waiting to see if it'll soften when washed.


Next is to add special things to the bottom three layers of the dress. I'm thinking on the first layer a large star with a 5 in it with smaller stars, second layer horseshoe prints, last layer either boots or vertical stripes. I was thinking of putting Cowgirl Madison somewhere on the dress but have heard you shouldn't put your kids name on things like that for safety. What do you think?


(Oh and getting back to the "close to my heart" in the title, I love horses. Don't own one, yet! But it's the main decoration in my house. lol)