Sparkly sparkly sparkly

A belated post to show you one of the other prom dresses I made last month.

This one's a little bit different to the sequinned number I showed in my last post, being duchess satin and there being a lot less of it, but equally stunning in it's own right. A satin skirt and ruched satin bodice front were connected by a number of embellished straps to make a really eye-catching dress!

From the front:

And the back:

Despite its flimsy appearance it fit the girl it was made for like a glove and wasn't at all precariously positioned when it was on her, quite an achievement I feel!

Sequins!

A post today to show you a few pictures of one of the prom dresses that I've finished in the last week. It's a lovely dress, elegant in the simplicity of the shape (which works so well with her willowey figure) but also modern in the fact that the material is small matt sequins.

From the front the dress looks like a very modest number, with long sleeves and a reasonably high neckline.

But from the back? A diamond cut-out adds an extra bit of wow without revealing too much.

And as is inevitable with sequins I'm still finding them on the floor despite having vacuumed since the dress left my workshop, it seems like they hide and creep out when I'm not looking!

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...

Second prom dress of the year

My second prom dress of the year is also in cotton jersey fabric but that's where the comparison with the red dress in previous posts stops. It's just as gorgeous but completely different.

This dress is floor length, with a deep 'v' neckline front and back, individually applied Swarovski crystal stars on the under-bust band both front and back and a leg-split topped with a crystal star.

Full-length shot:

Showing the front and back together (you can just see the star at the top of the leg split):

The star at the top of the split:

The girl this is made for is really thrilled with it, which is always gratifying, and it does look absolutely stunning on her (I know, I'm slightly biased, but it really does!)   
 

On the person it was made for...

Just a brief post this time! Our local paper, The Press, send a photographer to most of the local school proms so I was thrilled to receive an excited phone call from a customer yesterday to say that not only had her daughter been photographed in the dress I'd made for her but they'd put her right at the front of one of the photos. I knew she was going to look gorgeous in it on the night as she had in all the fittings, but it's lovely to be able to see that other people thought so too!

I don't have a copy of the actual photo as it's (quite rightly) copyrighted to The Press - they make them available for parents to buy as a momento so they're not going to give me a free copy, but it's available to view at the link below:

http://thepress.newsprints.co.uk/view/21031999/050520127219_jpg 

Prom dress season...the first one done

I know I've not blogged for a while, but April's been a bit of a strange month. I've been mad busy, with lots of things on the go at once, but I've not actually got to the end of any projects and had a finished object to show off (and the one I have, I haven't photographed yet).

But today that changed as I finished the first of two prom dresses that I've been working on. This one is made in red cotton jersey, which is a fabric which gives a lovely drape and fit to a dress (jersey seems to be a trend in prom / evening style dresses this year):

The asymmetrical strap is positioned so as to serve the purpose of holding the dress up properly as well as looking good. The 4 flowers each have 3 Swarovski crsytal beads in the centre, and are all detachable so that they can be repositioned to suit the wearer's fancy on the day.

This has been a lovely dress to work on, and it was really satisfying this afternoon to sit down to make the flowers and be able to take the final pictures!