Old nana's nightie refashion

My husband was not impressed when I came home from the op shop with this:

The photo doesn't do it justice: it's huge, it has lovely lace trim, and some special embroidery bits.  Obviously I'm not going to be wearing this anytime soon, but I thought the fabric would look so cute as a top for Ruby, so I chopped it up and whipped up a little popover.

If this looks familiar to anyone then it either means that a) this used to be your nightie, or b) you've read my post about the first dress I made Ruby.  I used the same pattern that I made for that dress but just chopped it off shorter, I also took it in a little at the sides. 

Here is a little closeup of the fabric:

You can imagine how cute this looks on her.  For those who can't imagine, here is a photo:

I want to make a dress with pleats in it for Ruby but was having a hard time working out how to factor pleats into the pattern (I have a self imposed rule of creating my own patterns).  Then I happened upon the Pleat section in my sewing encyclopedia which said that you can actually put the pleats into the fabric before cutting it up - what a revelation!  So I practiced with this popover.  I painstakingly put itty bitty pleats into the fabric because I wanted pleats on the front of the popover.

Itty Bitty pleats

Then, annoyingly, while I was pressing the seams after stitching the popover together my iron ruined my best laid plans.  Something is stuck to the bottom of my iron and it just got too hot and melted either the fabric or whatever is stuck to the bottom of the iron.

Iron Carnage

All was not lost though ... in my quest to avoid bias binding after having such a nightmare with Lola's neckline and armholes, I had made it reversible, so the pleats are on the inside and this nana's nightie lives to see another day.