A denim skirt and a terry top

A few weeks ago I made the great trek across Melbourne to go the The Fabric Store's sale and walked out with the most stunning French terry in a magnificent, almost fluorescent, shade of orangey-red on the outside and yet another hard-to-describe shade of yellowy-orange on the inside. Not the sort of colours I usually go for, but I fell in love and had to have it.

I used it to make pattern Q from Kids' Clothes Style Book: a loose-fitting raglan-sleeved top with three-quarter sleeves and a high-low hem. Of course I had to make the most of the beautiful inside of the fabric, so I used it to make flat piping for the raglan seams and rolled up the sleeves to make cuffs.

The skirt is BurdaStyle's girls' metallic skirt, which I made in denim. Simple enough to sew, provided you don't mind making up your own instructions as the ones provided are exceptionally brief (directions for sewing the fly were particularly unhelpful). I followed 'instructions' religiously when cutting the waistband but I'm sure it's meant to be significantly wider as it turned out too narrow for a decent-sized button, and it looks different from that shown in the pattern photograph. I would have redone it, but didn't have enough fabric as I was already using leftover scraps from a previous project. I wound up using a bar fastener in lieu of a button and also adding buttonhole elastic to the back section of the waist to ensure a good fit (a wise move, as it turned out).

R snatched the skirt from me the moment it was finished, which surprised me a bit, given that it lacks colour, glitter, decoration and cat motifs. The whole outfit looks quite grown-up compared to some most of her other clothes, but happily she's still a bubble-blowing little girl whose favourite food is fairy bread and who teaches a class of Beanie Boos in her bedroom every day after school.