So as you know in 2014 I really started my dressmaking and although I have only blogged about one garment I have been making other things but I am very bad at the finishing off stage of garments so they tend to lie about neglected and half finished, but today I am going to show you a garment that I made for my school charity fashion week.
Every year they have a walk called the art walk and it was formally only for the art students but since there aren't many of them in recent years it has been open to anyone. I entered the art walk with a friend 3 weeks before the fashion show.
Our theme was animals but apart from that we had complete freedom so we decided to do a butterfly. This is the design.
Our theme was animals but apart from that we had complete freedom so we decided to do a butterfly. This is the design.
It's not a great sketch but
as you can see we intended to create a fitted long sleeve black dress with
princess seams with a semicircle of fabric attached to the arms to create
"wings" when the arms were extended and a circular cape shape when the
arms were relaxed. The idea was that the wings would be concealed until the end
of the catwalk when the butterfly emerged leaving the audience in suspense up
until that moment.
To get
the desired effect I drafted the bodice of the Elisalex dress with the Georgia
dress bottom half to create a slim fitting princess seams it was easy as I
marked the waistline on each pattern and simply just laid the pieces on top of
each other matched them at the waistline and cut away any excess, I didn't have
to do any adjustments (I plan to do a more detailed post on this!). Including
the leaves there were only 8 pieces to cut out so it was a pretty quick sew.
The
using the diameter of the model's arm span I made a semicircle of fabric and
this semicircle was painted by my partner to look like butterfly wings. The
dress went down very well and I really enjoyed the process because having such
a sharp deadline made me finish the dress. The picture at the top of my post
was by the school photographer and here is one that I managed to snap of our
lovely model Harriet before she went on the catwalk.
Issey
