Monday, October 15, 2012

Green Standard Dress Version 2.0

I made the mistake of hanging my green standard dress on my closet door not in a garment bag for a while. After seeing it every night when I went to sleep and every morning when I woke up, I began to notice more and more mistakes and imperfections. Like Frankenstein, my creation stared at me and reminded me of everything I had done wrong again and again.

So it came to the point where I decided I needed to fix it.

My initial plan was to just restone it and hope that would solve a lot of the more glaring mistakes. I attempted to soak the dress in warm water, then tried washing it in the washing machine on warm (in a sewn shut pillow case) and still had not lost a single stone. Apparently I did a really good job with the gluing first time around. I know that acetone will remove the stones, but that means ruining the lycra underneath. As I was ordering fabric for the new pink standard dress, I decided to order a yard of lycra and some extra chiffon in the apple green, since it it now all on clearance. In the meantime as I started working on the pink dress, I realized I did not have enough organza and crinoline trim to do what I wanted with the underskirts. Since my parents will be in London in the next month, I am going to have them bring me more fabric to save the cost of shipping.

This meant that I still needed a dress for DCDI though, and I was not happy enough with the state of the green one to wear it. So I began working on the remakes, version 2.0, of the apple green standard dress. After only two days of work, here is the state:
The pink is just the other dress underneath,  I was too lazy to take it off.
I am going to be taking the organza skirts from the old version and adding them as the bottommost layer of skirts in addition to this layer here. I haven't worked up the courage to actually cut them off the other dress yet though. There's no going back then.

After a third day, the back seam is now sewn, the bodice has the elastic sewn in, and it has tan straps. I have decided to do high mesh gauntlets instead of sleeves with a lycra top, and hang my floats from them. More to come later, but there will be feathers!

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Pink Standard Dress in Progress

I've been terrible about taking pictures of this as it goes, but here are a few in progress.
Here you can see the underskirt pinned to the dress form with the bodice and overskirt pinned to the front

The view from the front