Picnic dress

What a beautiful day for a picnic

What a picnical day for a lark.

We will frolic all day

in the happiest way

and we won't get back home until dark.

(Mickey Mouse's Picnic, Simon and Schuster, 1950)

Summer is upon us!  We've had temps in the low 90s the last four or five days, and the humidity is ridiculous.  Welcome to summer in the city!  We made plans on Saturday to meet up at a local arboretum with another family from the kids' school, and given the heat, I knew I wanted to be in something easy.  We were also planning to picnic there, so out came the Picnic Dress!

I feel like I try to make some iteration of this dress every summer and every year (until now) I've not really succeeded.  It is amazingly difficult to find nice gingham that is 100% cotton.  This one is from Cotton+Steel (of course!) and is a little thicker than absolutely ideal, but I wore it all day in pretty yucky wet heat and was okay, so I think it will pass muster!  I did want something slightly smaller in scale, but the 1/2" gingham weave is growing on me.  I'm also happy that this is a woven gingham rather than a printed one.  I like the look of it better.

I do think the back elastic will need to be snugged in at some point, but keeping it slightly loose also means it is a little cooler in the heat.

I did have a bit of a think about the pockets on this one.  I realized on my flannel dresses that the bias cute kangaroo pocket kind of cuts the dress in half visually at a wide point on my body, and is perhaps not the most flattering, so I decided to go with bias cut patch pockets on this one.  I think it was the right call.  I'm planning to swap out the pockets on the flannel dresses for patch versions too.  (I'm actually going to remake one of them entirely because my plaid matching was so poor on the original one that it is embarrassing). 

I didn't get a good side shot of this dress, but I did match everything up on both sides and the shoulders--I'm pretty proud of myself for that!!  *pats back*

I really like it with the red shoes--they just make the whole outfit scream summer.

I went with red thread to topstitch on this dress, and I'm still not sure it was the best choice.  When you have a high contrast print like this one, you sort of have to choose between the two colors as to thread, and both were going to show a lot.  The red seemed to show less, I suppose.  I did struggle a little to get the pleats in the pockets to match--one pleat almost disappeared when I got the facing on.  I'm not sure why that keeps happening.

I pulled out my strawberry jewelry to wear with it and felt very summery indeed.

So, yay!  A successful gingham dress!

The kids had a great time, even if it was quite hot:

The arboretum was lovely, and had a lot more for the kids to do than some of the others we've tried around here.  It was a bit of a drive to get there, however, and there are lots of houses with lawns and green spaces on the way, and the kids kept pointing out the windows and exclaiming: "I see a park!  And another park!  And slides!"  We had to explain (repeatedly) that no, those were just people's lawns.  #urbankids

Just the facts:

Picnic dress: Cotton+Steel Basics gingham in red, Simplicity 1080 (redrafted), elastic, red bias tape

Shoes: SaltWater sandals

Earrings: ModCloth

Necklace: Etsy