Purging Party Patchwork Dress for an Operation Christmas Child Shoebox

I shared earlier that I have joined up at the Purging Party over at Stitched in Color and one of the items I am working on purging is all of my scraps left from pillowcase dresses I have made.  I decided it was about time to try to match them up and make patchwork dresses for my Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes.

I have seen some gorgeous patchwork dresses online but have never tried my hand at matching fabrics, other than two at a time and often one of those is a solid.  But I took the plunge and this is the result at my first attempt.

I had this center piece just the width it is here and started with that.  Of course, as you can see, I added two solid fabrics right off!  The mustard gold piece was just wide enough to cut into two to put on either side of the center panel.  The rose and blue/pink piece I had the most of, but used it all up in
this project.  The blue/pink piece has little shapes in it that almost mirror a shape in the center panel and the colors matched well. One thing I had read was to match large prints with small -- this was my attempt.  It took ALL the scraps to get it made and the size, a three, was determined by the size of the scraps.

I did not put on a pocket so it could possibly be reversible -- here's the back.

I sewed all my strips together and then cut it off the right length using the several inches from the bottom to sew a little tote bag for her to carry all the other goodies from her shoe box gift in.

I also stitched up a Grandma Sally's Bitty Blanket in the colors of the fabrics -- it, too, looks a little "scrappy."  I hope she likes them all!

If you'd like to make your own dresses I have written a tutorial and included the pattern here:  Simple Pillow Case Style Dress Tutorial.  And you can find more of my dresses here:  Dresses Made by Cheryl for Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes.