My little Samantha Rose was baptized on November 8th.  

 As I was trying to plan what dress I would make, I decided to go through all of my back issues of heirloom sewing magazines to find the free dress patterns in her size. (there were a lot of them because I have been collecting them for 12 years now!)  I then layed about seven of them on the table and asked Samantha what she likes.  What I got from her was “I like this one! No, wait, I like THIS one!  Oh, I want this one!” until she had said “this one” to almost every dress I showed her. 

You might think I should’ve just made her a dress that I liked and not worried about her picking one.  Well, when it comes to my own kids I tend to want them to have a  part in picking what I’ll make them.  They are all picky about which style they like.  So Samantha ultimately told me that as long as the sleeves are not puffy, she’ll probably like it.  ”Probably” wasn’t good enough for me.  I set aside the task and got busy doing lots of craft swaps.  When it was a week before the day of the baptism, I pulled out a few of the patterns again and asked her to pick one.  She wanted NO SMOCKING!!!  Was this MY child talking like this? 

Samantha picked the ‘Isabelle’s Garden Party’ pattern from Sew Beautiful issue #67 but did NOT like the  crochet tear drops which was fine with me because my crochet skills are very minimal.  As it turned out, I ran out of time to make all the tucks in the skirt too.  But it sure turned out pretty, and Samantha was thrilled with it!