End of a decade Christmas dresses

As in some previous years, I made Christmas dresses for all my four grand-daughters. They are now mostly old enough to be very specific as to what they would want. Two wanted 'shiny' , one wanted rainbows and unicorns, and one wanted nothing frilly, preferably red. So here's what I made. 

There are links below to how I made all of these, and for two of them, to the free patterns they were made from.

This dress for Ada, in size 3 was made from Life Sew Savory's Sweet Rose Dress pattern - a free PDF pattern.

The Sweet Rose dress and pattern review is here.

The next dress, for Rose age almost 5, was made in a size 6 from Patterns for Pirates (P4P) Tiny Tulip pattern

The Tiny Tulip dress and review is here.

The other two dresses, though they may look very different, were actually made from the same pattern, with my modifications.

This was a Burda pattern #9379. Jane's was made in size 7, and Fleur's in size 8. In fact I'm already debating whether to extend the bodice length on Jane's. Both girls are only 6 (Jane not even 6 yet, in fact) but both are tall for their ages, and I will remember to make the bodice longer in future if I use this pattern again. The waistline is up round her ribs.

Jane's and Fleur's from the Burda pattern 

Jane's, above, more or less followed the Burda pattern and instructions, though the width of the shiny skirt and sleeve fabric forced me to shave a bit of width off the skirt. No matter, as I also made a net overskirt which was fuller. Here's the net overskirt, which was more than a full circle skirt - about 1 1/2 circles.

Here are the two worn together. She sometimes also wears them separately.

While Fleur will now (occasionally) be persuaded into a dress or skirt, she still loaths 'frilly'. Her tartan pleated dress had gone down pretty well the previous Christmas, and she loves red, So I went for a similar look this year.  The top of this dress was a stretch jersey, but not with a huge amount of stretch, so I put a zip down the back, as I had for Jane's. The skirt is a woven lightweight tartan. It doesn't have full pleats (again, the fabric was too narrow for that). 

Back, showing zip partially undone

Front

Anyway, she seemed pretty happy with it!

So the Burda pattern has been reasonably successful, though for our tall girls, I've sized up, and in future may also need to length the bodice for Jane. I'm very glad to have a girls' dress pattern with sleeves though.

And here are all four of them, dressed for Christmas Day!