Fall Harvest Ball dress

My oldest daughter has a formal to go to soon so I am working on a dress for her to wear to it.   The dress is deep chocolate brown hard to tell in the photos.  Also it has tulip sleeves which I for got to take a picture of from the side so you could see that.

I have sewn on to it lots and lots of leaves  and little circle burnt umber sequins. The leaves are supposed to look like they are swirling and falling into a big pile of leaves at the hem I hope I achieved my goal and that is doesn't just look sort of weird to people.I still have yet to steam the dress from having sewn on the sequins most of these wrinkles will go away at that time.

 I plan on making an orange satin sash to go around the waist that ties in the back  of the dress with a large bow and either has pleats or gathers in the front.  So if you were wondering why the gap in the sequins at the waist that is the reason why there is going to be a belt there that I have yet to even buy the fabric for.

Wish me luck on finding something that will match so to speak either the orange crinoline or the burnt umber sequins.  We do like the look of the crinoline peeking out the bottom of the dress that is not a mistake.

The brown dress was an $8.00 thrift shop find that I am revamping.

I also think I will be making a choker to go with this dress with a  few of the leaves on it as well.

Happy Halloween

Hope every one is safe tonight trick or treating .  The three dresses you see my daughters wearing are all hand made the blue one is Cinderella (a dress we used in the ball scene in sound of music).  We thought it close enough to be Cinderella even with out the puff sleeves and flounce.  The green tan dress is a peasant dress my children have for Shakespeare week at school that doubles as a Halloween costume and the red Shakespearean costume I made 2 days ago ( 20 hours of cutting and sewing in one day to make that dress.  It will be used for Shakespeare week as well.  It is a little big for all my girls but I figure we have a ton of costumes that fit them well so this is one with growing room.  The nice man in the photo is my husband who I am lucky enough to be married too.  I was dressed up as well in a Shakespeare costume mine was red velvet with gold trim but since I was the one with the camera no one took a picture of me.

New Red Shakespeare dress

I made this dress on October 29th just in time for Halloween.  It is a size 6 adult dress and my daughter needs to grow a little to fit it well as she is about a size 2 to size 4.

But since we have a lot that fit her now, that is good that it is a little big and she can where it next year.   My children have a 1 week long celebration of  Shakespeare at school at the end of every school year.  So this costume will see lots of wear during that week.
The nice thing about this costume was I already had all the supplies to make it on hand.  This dress uses a lot of fabric 13 yards.  Thus a very heavy warm dress to wear  which is good for Halloween.  The back is closed by lacing it up, yes she needs help from someone else to do that.  Not one zipper or button in the entire dress,there are   11 grommets per side 22 grommets total to close the dress.
There are several fabrics used in the construction of this costume, upholstery fabric (red leaves), upholstery fabric tone on tone cream fabric, cream silk to line the drape part of the sleeves and line the inside of the fitted sleeves, burgundy satin on the out side of the drape part of the sleeves.  The bodice is lined with the cream upholstery fabric  this will make it last longer.  Every seem is enclosed in bias tape so as not to fray. This red fabric wanted to ravel as soon as it was cut, thus the reason for 20 hours of cutting and sewing in one day if I had waited it would have unraveled on its own before I even got to sewing it. The sleeves are also fully lined but they are lined with cream silk to make it more comfortable and soft on the skin as opposed to upholstery fabric which is harsh at times.  There is gold cording to lace up the back.  I used black velvet ribbon on the sleeves with an over lay of upholstery braid.  I also used gold, cream, and burgundy upholstery cord on twill tape to highlight seams, neck line, and hem.  Because of all the linings and seam bindings and the shear number of pieces this dress had this is probably one of the hardest dresses I have ever sewn.  If I was to sell a dress like this its price would be between $600- $1000 dollars depending on the fabrics used.

I do want to make more complicated patterns like this in the future for my children to have. I took some of these photos with my phone so not the best of quality on some of them.

Leisel's curtain dress

So I am in the middle of the play and last night was opening the actors did amazing great job to all of them.   This is Leisel's Dress you can see one of the other dresses in the background with some of the mods I did to it after I posted.

It had even more modifications than that by the time I was done with it.  As with the others this is a vintage pattern that I used for this dress.  I did a major /minor modification.  Minor in that I moved the zipper from a discrete under the arm to center back which makes it much much much easier to get in and out of for the 1 minute costume change.  I am happy to say that all the actors made all of their costumes changes in that 1 minute that is saying a lot considering the amount of people their ages and that this is an amateur production.