My little girl was outgrowing all her clothes, so a few months ago between other projects I sandwiched in making some 6-9 month size dresses for her. I used a very basic baby dress pattern (not vintage, but a classic style) and cut out 4 dresses at once from leftovers in my fabric stash.

I did variations on each one, just for fun. This fun pattern has a band added at the bottom which allows for a lot more creativity than if the skirt was all one piece. And I didn't even try color blocking with it yet! All of them are sleeveless, both to make them a faster project, and so they are more versatile. In these photos I layer them over long sleeves, but they could also be worn over short sleeves, or during the hot weather without any other layer underneath.

My first dress turned out too tight in the arm and neck, and I did the band wrong, so it is not my favorite. Still wearable, I put it away with a smaller size of girl clothes. This one had contrasting piping at top of the skirt band.

This next one was cut out of a skirt of a dress my mom didn't want anymore. It's amazing how little fabric baby clothes take! It's so easy to squeeze them out of a good section of fabric from an old garment.

This one I simply sewed rick rack over the seam of the bottom band, and added decorative buttons on the front.

The neck and sleeve openings fit a lot better, once I cut them a little bigger. I used double fold binding and left the binding show, since this was an everyday dress.

Dress #3 is made from leftovers from my 4th of July dress a few years back. Again I cut the arm and neck holes larger and just used bias binding to finish them.

I found some vintage poppy trim in my stash that exactly matched the colors of the poppies on the fabric…on a larger dress it would have been too much, but on a baby dress, can you have too many poppies???

This shot is purely to show off those adorable red-gold curls. She gets compliments from strangers about her hair ALL the time when we are shopping.

My favorite, dress #4, I spent more time on and made it fancier. When I was sewing the top pleats in, I mistakenly put the wrong two marks together so I ended up with only 3 darts – which was perfect, because that automatically made the neck opening larger. That also meant I could top stitch some cotton lace between the 3 darts.

I used the same lace as insertion lace between the band and the skirt hem, which turned out so cute! The pattern shows insertion done with jumbo rickrack, which I like too.

This one I turned the bias binding to the inside for a neater finish to the neck and arms. I like how the band, which you fold in half, makes a nice deep hem finish as well.

This dress used leftovers from fabric I bought many years ago and used for one of my earliest sewing projects that I took more care with and actually turned out well – a 1940s dress. It's a good color for a redhead too!

The nice thing about dresses like this is they will fit for a long time. It doesn't matter if the skirt's a little short eventually. Also the pattern is easy to adjust for a larger size. I'd like to make another one combining two different fabrics…and I haven't tried a sleeved version or any of the accessories included in this pattern yet either.

The blue one took the longest because of adding the lace, but none of them took very long – and doing them in an assembly line fashion made the process even speedier. It's such a quick way to get a bigger baby girl wardrobe in a new size!