Little princess cape

My daughter loves dress ups.  So when I saw this dress in a bag of clothes my sister-in-law gave me, I immediately thought of a cape.

(This picture was in my October of 2010 folder.)

The dress is that stretchy velour/velvety stuff, so there was no way I could work with it on my machine.  Ahem.  My old machine (technically my mom's, but whatever).  I finally got to it yesterday in my cutting frenzy.

First thing, I measured my daughter from shoulder to floor and then cut that length plus a couple inches off the bottom of the dress.  The couple of inches was because I wanted it to still be long on her in a few years.  Then I opened up one of the side seams on the dress.  It was pretty much a big rectangle.  I didn't cut any of the width off because I wanted it to be nice and full.

For the cape/cloak hood, I used the top part of the dress.  I found a hood template online and then just eyeballed it.  I made it much taller than my daughter would need because I wanted it to be all droopy and loose.  Like this:

So here's my hood pattern piece:

 I ended up cutting of that little tab to the left of the red line, so go ahead and ignore that. 

Then you put your two hood pieces wrong sides together and sew along the curve (the green line in the picture).

And that's the only picture I took of the process.  Nice.  I didn't get to sewing until after dark, so I didn't even bother taking pictures because I knew how poorly they would turn out.  I am not a good tutorial-izer.

Then I took my cape piece and sewed a basting stitch along the top, about a quarter inch down.  I gathered it until it was the same length as the bottom part of the hood, then pinned wrong sides together and sewed.  Maybe this picture will help:

Then I hemmed up one side, up and over the hood, and down the other. No bottom hem needed because I used the existing one on the dress. Done.

Here's the finished product on my little uncooperative model:

 Then she started to get into it a little.

 She was pretty sold when she found out it was good for twirling.

It's a good addition to her dress-ups, I think.  Even though right now it's definitely in second place to either of her princess skirts, I'm betting it will get a lot of use over the coming years.  I know I would have loved a cloak like that when I was little.  My husband said he probably would have thought it was pretty cool, too.