Amelia's Party Dress

I mentioned in my post about Matilda's Ball Gown that I also bought a dress for Amelia and that I would talk about it at a later date. Today is that day! So here is what I think about Amelia's Party Dress:

Here is her dress in the box the day I got it:

I really like that Amelia has her own color scheme and design to her boxes by the way.

And here is the dress on her in the garden today!

 This is actually a five piece set and we'll start with the hat!

A Girl for All Time calls this a feathered walking hat. It's similar to a pillbox hat though. It's made of a lace covered white satiny material and is actually pretty soft. So to help it keep it's shape it has a loop of white cardboard inside. You can take that out but it doesn't stay nice and stiff without it! It also has an elastic band to help it stay on her head.

Here you can see the decorations

The hat is decorated with a small white rose, some cream tulle and a large feather piece. It's more of a loop of down than one single feather.

The dress is made of a pink taffeta-silk (according to AGfAT) and in my opinion that wasn't a very good choice for this. It just seems to look very wrinkled all the time. Even in the promotional shots, but maybe it only bothers me?

The jacket:

The jacket has four mother of pearl like buttons on the front and two hiding just under the top of the bow in the back.  It's trimmed with lace at the collar and cuffs. The cuffs also have a velvet ribbon around them. Which you can see below:

Velvet ribbon and lace on the cuffs.

I'm not sure why but, except for the large button at the top, the buttons don't line up with the snaps that actually hold the jacket closed. I also found that the thread holding the snaps to the dress was a bit flimsy. I actually broke one of the female halves of a snap off and had to reattach it. I love the fact that this company rarely uses velcro but if you are going to use this type of closure the thread that attaches them to the fabric needs to be pretty strong. Especially when this is meant to be played with by little kids that aren't always as careful as they should be.

The skirt:

The skirt is trimmed all the way around with two velvet ribbons and taffeta ruffles. The front is also decorated with two bows but the back looks pretty plain until you add:

The bustle! This time it's a separate piece that attaches to two snaps on the sides of the skirt. It is trimmed with the same velvet ribbon and ruffles as the rest of the skirt.  Off of the doll I really don't like the look of the bustle. I think it just look like a floppy wing of unecessary fabric but on:

I really I like how full it makes the back of the dress look!

See isn't that neat? I was actually pretty surprised by how good it looks! I would probably say the bustle is my favorite part of the whole outfit.

Last and totally least are her slippers:

I'm so underwhelmed by these. Again we have Matilda's original shoes in a different fabric and this time they don't even have any sort of trim or decoration. You can see that the back of my slippers are frayed. They didn't come that way! Unfortunately this fabric isn't stiff enough for these slippers and they are incredibly difficult to get on! I messed up the back of mine by using my nails to get them on and off.

Here are a few more pictures for you:

Amelia thinking deep thoughts like man this lady needs to weed out here!

Amelia holding back her hair for me while I get ready to attach the bustle.

Another shot of Amelia in the garden.

The bottom line is that this is a pretty dress and I really like it, but it's not my favorite. I like the hat and all the details like the velvet and the bows and buttons but I really don't like this fabric. It just doesn't feel as substantial to me as Matilda's ball gown. I really think that they are dropping the ball on these shoes. Any different kind of slipper would have been great or even just some lace and they really needed to reinforce the heels. I'm glad that this is in my collection but if I had to choose again I would probably spend the extra ten dollars and buy her ballet costume!

I do have some exciting news! The first is that the mysterious doll I mentioned forever ago finally has a shipping date and I should get her before Christmas!! The second even more awesome piece of news is that I'm visiting the St. Louis American Girl store this weekend with my mom! We are meeting in St. Louis to take my brother to the Japanese Festival and the store isn't far away from our hotel. I'm not sure what I'm going to bring home but you can bet there will be a post all about it when I get back. Till then!