What would you do if your tween showed you a photo of an outfit that she’d just dressed her Sim in and asked you to sew her a real life version?

What I did was sigh deeply, then say that of course I could sew something similar! And I jumped on to the Lekala website to see what I could come up with. I came up with these two patterns.

I plugged in Stella’s measurements, and around 15 minutes later I was printing off the patterns (yes, Lekala are that fast). Then it was into the car for a trip to Spotlight for fabrics. Stella wasn’t with me, so we had a pretty funny Whatsapp video call for her to select the fabrics that she preferred. I bought them, came home again, and a few hours later we had this!

Not the same as the original dress, but definitely Sim inspired! So, on to the details. I’ll start with the skirt.

The pattern is Lekala 4645, described as ‘double skirt’.  Waist measurement is the key for this style.  There is a zip set into the left side seam, and the waistband closes with a button and buttonhole.  As is always the case with Lekala patterns, the instructions are fairly brief.  It helps if you’ve sewn a lot before, or have a sewing reference handy to assist with any potentially tricky bits such as zip insertion.

The fabrics are cotton sateen. We thought that it would have the right amount of body and oomph for the style, and it definitely does. While this was a perfect choice of fabric for the skirt, I don’t think that it worked quite as well for the top.

The top is Lekala 4656 and the recommended fabrics for this one are ‘blouse fabric, lace’. The cotton sateen is okay, but something drapier would work better with the centre front pleats, and the edge finishes would look neater.  A combination of the fabric type, self fabric bias strip finishing and the fact that it’s sewn in a rather small size makes the armholes and necklines bulkier than I’d prefer.

That said, the fit overall is pretty good and allows for a fair bit of growing room (much needed for Stella at the moment). I chose to sew a separate skirt and top rather than combine them into a dress because I thought that there was more chance of future wear if they were separates. I suspect that I’m right and that the skirt will get much more wear than the top.

You can see that there is plenty of room in the top! It was also very long – I chopped a fair bit off it and there was still plenty left to tuck in. That’s one of the hazards of using Women’s patterns for a tween, despite it being drafted to measurements.

One happy tween – and therefore a happy mother!  It was fun to work together to turn her vision into reality.