I realize that my sewing skills, while they have gone much further than they were back when I sewed my high school homecoming dress out of a curtain and my mother looked on in horror at my seams, that I probably shouldn't go buy a lot of expensive fabric and go to town. Hence, my test dress is being sewn out of an old sheet. This is what I came up with after a couple of hours, with a base/lining, and the top draping bit (which took by far the longest):
I then added the rest of the bodice top layer, but it's really loose because I was planning on doing a corset bodice, so it was basically clipped together in the back with a hair clip:
And that's where I stopped. I decided that since I wanted to do boning, I should probably actually get a pattern that would teach me how to do it. After looking at every single evening and wedding gown pattern on the internet (approximately 2,375,338), I settled on an out-of-print Vogue pattern as my base:
I got the pattern in the mail on Friday, but seeing as how my invitations have exactly 3 days to magically make themselves, it's been put to the back burner. But it's been simmering, have no fear. So here are my thoughts, feel free to chime in. First of all, that sheer thing on the top of the bodice is hideous and isn't structural at all, so it's gone. So basically what I have here is a simple strapless mermaid dress. I'm not exactly what you would call normal, and this definitely extends to how I want my wedding dress to look, so I don't want a simple strapless mermaid dress. My first dress, which has since been returned, was a gorgeous, simple silk sheath dress, which was vetoed as being too simple:
I loved the straps and the differentness of it, but it wasn't as flattering on as it could have been.
So my thoughts for the front of the dress are to modify it to have some sort of strap that either is sheer that goes over the sweetheart strapless neckline, or modify it entirely to look more like the original dress, and this one:
My thought is that this will also still get vetoed for being too plain, so I'll add something like this waistline doodad:
The back is definitely too plain on the pattern, so I have to spice that up a bit too. I have no idea if this is possible or not, but I would love to lower it a bit and have the straps do something like this:
Although I'm loving how the straps go down into the detachable train like this one:
I will definitely add some sort of detachable train, just not sure yet the best place and method for attaching it.
So there you have it folks. Who knows if I will actually do any of this, but at least I have lots of ideas. :) Any thoughts?
(photo 1: unknown, 2 & 3: my lovely camera phone, 4 & 5: Vogue, 6 & 7: Nicole Miller, 8, 10, 11: Amanda Wakeley, 9: Jenny Packham)
