Easter Sewing Plans

Well this weekend my goal is to get some sewing done!!! Seriously need to get my older daughter's Easter dress made (wanna see a pic of what I'm going to make it out of? Wanna wanna? Wait for it...) and my younger two's outfits washed up. My son's came from WalMart and is going to dual-duty for my brother's wedding this spring. My baby's dress is a beautiful brand new with tags dress that I actually swapped for on SwapMamas.com. (As an aside, if you're thinking of joining SwapMamas you should know that they are totally revamping their system and relaunching in about a month so if you don't want to deal with their growing pains in the meantime you can wait until the relaunch.)
We have searched for an Easter dress for my oldest and come up empty. We found a few stunningly beautiful ones that when I examined them closer turned out to be pathetic quality and/or workmanship. Since I don't want her Easter dress to fall apart in the wash, I decided to be brave and sew her one. Ahhh! I'm not that great at sewing. I understand the basics but pattern instructions confuse me. I think whoever writes the directions on those things gets a thrill out of making things seem harder than they have to be and scaring off would-be budding seamstresses. I have once or twice just ignored the instructions and pieced the item together without them.
But I digress; I was going to tell you about the dress for my daughter. I am not really good at sewing and I can count on one hand everything I've sewn since I had kids that wasn't a plain skirt. I can also count on one hand all the dresses I've made in my entire lifetime. Scary thought. Considering the fact that I not only have to sew my oldest's Easter dress this weekend, but also a formal skirt for myself for something I have to do in a few days. Jury duty. I don't think my full flowery go-to skirts are quite what they have in mind when they said to wear something court-friendly. Maybe it doesn't matter but to share a little secret I'm kind of paranoid about doing something wrong since someone I know told me about a mom who got arrested for contempt of court because she couldn't find a babysitter! Eeek! So that's got me all in worry mode that if I do something they deem inappropriate they're going to arrest me or something. I'm kinda shy so I think if they merely gave me the dissaproving eye I may well just wet myself in terror. Okay maybe not quite that bad but you get the drift, I aim to please. ;)

Now where was I? Oh yes, the dress! I happened to have swapped (yes on SwapMamas again) for a lovely spring skirt that is definately way too small for me back in the middle of the winter and saved it. See?

So my super secret sneaky plot is to turn it into a pillowcase style dress for my daughter's Easter dress. :D See how well I cheat? Lol! If I can manage not to mess it up too bad it should be fairly easy and not time consuming. The PROBLEM with this style of dress is that, as per my opinions on modesty mentioned in the previous post, I think a pillow case dress is going to be a mite skimpy. So I want to mommy-rig a plain white muslin peasant top for her to wear underneath, using this pattern as a guide:

So we shall see if this takes my time and effort quota into "shoulda-just-made-a-whole-dress-from-scratch" territory. I'll keep you posted...