Hello friends! It’s finally FALL! My favorite season. My husband loves the colder weather and getting outside. I love the colors, the flavors, and the excitement of a new school year (I work for a school). He also says that Halloween is also the beginning of the exciting holiday season, that culminates in Christmas (his favorite, he’s such a little kid at heart 😊 ).
ANYWAY, it’s time for a new costume and this year my 2 year old girl is obsessed with Minnie Mouse. I will be purchasing the white gloves, and have a black, long sleeve shirt and black tights to go with the outfit, but I had to determine the best pattern to use to create the dress. 
Looking at Minnie’s dress, there are a few key things, a rounded collar, puffy, short sleeves, and a separate skirt piece. As I looked through the Ellie and Mac dress patterns, I realized I would have to mash a couple together. I started with the School Cool dress because it had a puffy, short sleeve option with a separate skirt piece. Then I found the collar I needed from the Valedictorian dress. Now, I had to print out the front bodice piece for both dresses and overlay them. I needed the width of the School Cool dress (to match with the skirt) and the neckline of the Valedictorian dress so that the collar would attach properly and not be too small.
So you can see with the overlay that both the neckline and width of the bodice piece are different. However, again, we will cut along the Valedictorian neckline, and the original bodice shape of the School Cool. Once that was done, the rest was just following the directions like normal! Sew up sleeves and bodice, attach skirt to bodice, make collar (as described in Valedictorian pattern) and sew on!
The only other alteration I made was an additional skirt layer. I had found this adorable, tulle-based fabric with pink flowers on it that I thought would make a great skirt layer for Minnie Mouse. The flowers even had white polka dots! Because the flowers were sewn on tulle, and the whole thing was relatively light, I didn’t feel the need to reinforce the bodice to skirt seam with clear elastic. I did, however, go around the seam a couple times with the serger, just to make sure my daughter wouldn’t accidentally pull a stitch will running around with the dress on.
We have a pair of Minnie Mouse ears that my sister got for my daughter, but it has a red bow instead of pink. So if I can find a new set of Minnie ears (or find time to make some), we will swap for a pink bow instead.
The last piece is a tail. I will be using a piece of pink ribbon and sewing a piece of black fleece to it for the tail. It will be 2 inches wide at the ribbon belt, 12” long, and tapered at the end to a point. My daughter is about 34” tall, so I didn’t want the tail to be too long that it was even close to dragging on the ground. Another way to gauge a good tail length is to make it about the same length as the skirt.
(Written by Kendall Powers)
