Another dress for a wedding...

...this time for me to wear!

Thanks are due to my step-dad Ray for the pics of me in this post, as he kindly took proper pics of me wearing the dress before we headed out to the wedding rather than me taking them later on my dressmaker's dummy (I've not yet mastered taking photos of myself, although Ray has given me some tips to try out!)

The dress is made from 'Stoff' cotton, which is a lovely weight and drapes well. The bodice is boned and lined with black poplin, the skirt is a full circle (great fun in the wind, both me and my decency are grateful to my friends for their interventions on a couple of occasions!!) I also made a net petticoat to wear underneath in order to get the proper shape on the skirt.

This is a really fun dress to wear, but what was even more fun was getting to watch two good school-friends get married - they both looked so happy and it was an amazing day!

The evolution of an existing pattern...

I have a regular customer who has had two dresses made from the same pattern previously (the last one featured in my blog a couple of weeks ago). For a wedding a week or so ago she asked if I could find a suitable fabric for a summer wedding and make her a dress using the same bodice but with a fuller skirt to give it a softer look.

Fortunately we managed to find the perfect fabric (so perfect in fact that I bought myself some to make a summer skirt) and after drafting a new skirt pattern the resulting dress was exactly what she had in mind:

I think she's had more traumas finding the matching accessories than she did the dress - she's got the bag and belt (white of course) but the right shoes weren't easy to find at all!

From sari to dress

Another prom dress to share with you this week, this time made from a length of Sari silk that had been brought back from a trip to India.

The dress itself is fairly simple, the hardest part was deciding how best to cut it to use the most dramatic parts of the sari. In the end we went for a 'princess line' bodice (with sweetheart neckline) cut so that what used to be the border of the sari now sits along the waistline of the dress. 

The skirt was then cut as two rectangles to allow us to use the border around the hemline, with pleats at the waist gave the skirt some shape. 

The lining in this dress is serving a joint purpose of reducing the sheerness of the dress and supporting the silk along the zip and waist seams (yes, the silk is that fine!)

This is definitely one of those dresses that doesn't show it's full glory on a dressmaker's dummy (not helped by the weird light most days at the moment, even the morning's aren't really good enough for photography!). The girl it's for looks absolutely stunning in it, filling it out in a way an inanimate dummy just can't imitate so you'll have to take my word for it. It's still a really cute dress even on a dummy though...