Jensen’s blessing dress

I had a lot of fun sewing Jensen's Blessing dress, and I love how it turned out. I apologize for the wrinkled dress and bad lighting/pictures, but I have little to no time these days with most of it taken up in caring for the baby along with the rest of my busy brood. I had to just get them taken 'as is' if I ever wanted to get this post done. Oh well, you'll just have to forgive me.

Never having worked with silk dupioni before, I worried it would be a repeat of my nightmarish first experience with velvet. As it turned out it was a dream to work with and I am planning a few more projects using silk dupioni again. Anyways, back to the blessing dress. I used a simple pattern as a jumping off point, and I just made it over to my liking. I changed the sleeves from short, puffed and gathered to a 3/4 length with a ruffle at the sleeves edge and no gathering at the shoulder.

I then shortened the length of the bodice, lengthened the skirt portion of the dress, and added an underskirt ruffle to the bottom hem of the dress that made it look like there was a second layer underneath, and then added pintucks on the bodice front and on the skirt of the dress. (I wish my pictures did the dress justice, they lighting is bad and the wrinkles are really doing more harm here than needed, but I am just going to have to stop fretting and just let it go. I don't have time to do any better right now, again, I'm sorry.)

I kept the bonnet simple by adding a row of pintucks along the crown and added a ruffle all around the edge so that it framed her cute face and tied it off with velvet ribbon.

I love, love, love the end result of the entire outfit, it was perfectly classic, modern, simple, and girly enough to suit little Jensen to a "T".

And to top it all off, Craig's Mom crocheted the most beautiful pair of little shoes for Jensen to wear with her Blessing dress on her special day. Here she is after the blessing in the little pink dress I changed her into for the family gathering at my house afterwards. I wanted to make sure her pretty little shoes could be seen, her Grandma's hard work needed to be shown off on her cute little grandbaby.

I made sure to get a quick shot of Jensen with Craig and I right after church, because I knew I would forget to do it later once I got busy. Jensen was ready to be done but humored me just long enough for this shot.

The next picture we took has her howling. Oh well, we were done anyways.

Jensen had a lovely Blessing day complete with gorgeous weather for those traveling from far away to attend, and lots of family, food and fun at our house afterwards as we celebrated her special day.