It will be a long, bishop sleeve, fitted bodice dress with a tucked skirt for my 8 year old daughter. The fabric is shirting so the bodice will be lined. I'm not sure if I will line the sleeves as well. This will be a simple winter dress.
The pattern for this dress can be found over at The Sewing Academy.org. It's the HMP/SA 250: Girls’ Dresses Pattern. I love this pattern and will be using a straight size. It will start out a bit big but my daughter will grow into it and be able to use it again next year. The added tucks may even allow her to get a third year out of this dress.
7/17/2013 Update - I was able to get some work done on this dress and I wanted to take a moment and share. Here is an image of the bodice (I decided on a yoke, gathered bodice) and the tucks on the skirt. Since I used cotton shirting for this dress, it doesn't like to hang well. To give it more weight at the hem, I gave a generous turn of 4" as well as three 1" tucks (each tuck uses 2").
Usually I don't calculate the amount of yardage that I used but this dress is to be entered in a fabric stash contest and the yardage is important. The skirt being three panels around and each being a full yard gives three yards to the skirt. The bodice, being the yoked style and given extra in the gathered part in the front, the natural waist for the back and lined with plain cotton all cut to the natural waist style, used an entire yard and a half itself. For the sleeves, I chose the full bishop variation that uses but 2/3rds of a yard. Then there is the miscellaneous pieces used for the waistband, binding the neck and sleeve cuffs. In total this dress will use 5.5 yards. This is of course without decorations.
7/26/2013 Update - Well, I'm a bit overdue on this since I wanted to have it made last month. Here it is, all finished. There are but three tucks and plenty of room if I want to add some more. The sleeves had to be pieced because I decided, after I cut them, that I wanted them to be a bit longer.
Here's a close-up of the pieced sleeve:
