Generally when I want to make something, I go to Etsy first. There are plenty of talented people out there who have taken the time to make all sorts of beautiful PDF patterns that I can just download and use. But when Little Bear started collecting all sorts of small animals and people, the site was uncharacteristically unhelpful. Some of my crafty friends have made little crayon and car rolls lately so I turned to pictures of those to try and brainstorm an idea of my own.
Of course, it’s worth mentioning that I got this idea at 8pm and didn’t make it to my local fabric store until 8:30, so my fabric selection was a bit hurried. Also, I then stayed up until 3:45 in the morning working on this. And that is important because visualizing how I was going to piece this together was probably much hampered by my lack of sleep. However, it would have been more hampered by two awake children so I did what I could.
Originally the pockets were going to be much more elaborate and actually look like little dresses. Well, first of all, that was going to be too hard. And second, I wanted this to be of use beyond her (hopefully short-lived) interest in Disney Princesses. The fabric does sort of coordinate with their dresses, though, which makes me unreasonably happy!
So, I didn’t make a fancy PDF pattern, but for those of you who are interested, here’s what I did.
After figuring out how big I wanted my pockets (this was sort of trial and error), I pieced them together like quilt squares. I then sewed some coordinating fabric on the back.
Then I figured how long I wanted the entire roll to be, did some fancy math, and decided how much each pocket would have to be gathered at the bottom to fit. This also involved a lot of pinning, seeing if a princess would fit, and adjusting. I used a disappearing ink pen (so cool!) to mark where each pocket should end. Plus I left about 2 inches of blue on each side.
I then pinned the pockets, hand gathered them and ironed the gathers in place. I did pin them at first but I got lazy.
You can see how much longer the pockets started out than when they were finished.
I sewed the gathers, then put iron on fleece backing on the purple (outside) fabric to give it a little bit of weight.
After that (I’m making this sound much easier than it was), I set the top and bottom pieces together and rolled it up to see where to sew tabs and Velcro. A lot of the rolls on Etsy have ribbon tying them up but I was hoping Little Bear would be able to do this without much assistance! (More disappearing ink in the picture below).
I added some ribbons and embroidery to the purple piece for embellishment. The words didn’t turn out as bold as I wanted but whatever.
This was all rolling/unrolling, trial and error. Finally, I sewed the purple to the blue and it was done! I can’t wait to show it to her!
(A final note, for those of you with sharp eyes… We do have two Aurora’s. One has the soft dress and one has the MagiClip dress. I imagine if she keeps liking them we’ll transition fully to MagiClip so I made the pockets big enough to compensate. Also, we don’t have Mulan or Jasmine, hence the light pink and teal pockets. And finally, yes, Rapunzel’s hair is too long and the wrong color to be in her wedding dress. Talk to Disney about it.)
