Sewing For A Girl

Today we are celebrating my one and only niece's 3rd birthday.  Yup, I have 2 sons, 5 nephews, and only 1 niece.  So whenever I get the opportunity to sew for her, I love to go all girly and pink and princess.  This little girl is as girly girl as they come.  And she loves her dollies and just like any little girl she has tons of them and naturally they all have tons of little accessories to go along with them.  A while ago I had seen this quilted suitcase tutorial, and at the time, while I thought it was adorable, I didn't have anyone specifically to make it for.  When it came time to brainstorm ideas of what to sew for my niece's 3rd birthday, I remember having seen this suitcase and thought it would be a perfect idea to make for her to hold all of her dollies' things in.  Pulling from my stash, I found I had a yard of this really cute princess and castle fabric. Combining that with a few other fabrics from my stash, I got right to work on the suitcase. 

 The tutorial was pretty straight forward, and combined with my previous bag making skills and tricks I had learned, the suitcase went together pretty quickly.  That is until I got to the park where I attached the top of the suitcase to the zipper and center gusset.  I might have gone a little pin crazy to make sure everything lined up and needless to say, I ended up stabbing myself and bleading a little bit on the zipper.  ouch! yukk....

Thankfully it cleaned out pretty well.  However, I got stalled on adding the binding to the raw edges on the outside of the suitcase.  You see, in order for it to look nice, the binding needed to be sewn down by hand which is most definitely Not my favorite method of sewing on binding. 

Finally it was done, but I felt like it was missing something so I whipped together two opened wide zippered pouches from my favorite tutorial found here.  These will be great for storing all sorts of dolly accessories.

Still feeling like this gift wasn't quite done especially since I had a few largish scraps of the castle fabric left, I decided to purchase this pattern to make a set of doll sleeping bags. 

They turned out so cute even if my husband insists they look like oven mitts.  Finally, I was done and this adorable set was ready to go.  Even my niece's dolly that she had accidentally left at our house the other day seems to be pretty happy with how things turned out.

I'll be giving this to my niece at her birthday party later today.  I'm pretty sure she'll like it. :)