Ever since I learned how to sew back in 1996 I have been making prom dresses almost every year. I try to only take on one dress per year because it’s a lot of work and there needs to be sufficient time to make changes if necessary as what happened in this situation 🙂

Before I even cut into the actual fabric I have to make a mock up sample first to make sure everything is fitting right, make my markings and then I cut it out along the seam lines to get my pattern pieces.

Mock up Sample cut up:

Then I take these pieces and transfer them to paper where I add my seam allowances:

Pattern pieces are then placed on the fabric to cut out and sew:

 

Before I go any further with this dress I would like to show you the original sketch my prom girl had in mind for her dress:

Soon after this sketch was made she changed her mind about the plunging neckline and went for a low back scoop neck top with short sleeves..and oh yea some fancy beading to the back!!

We went fabric shopping and she fell in love with a gold sequin material. At this point I wasn’t sure about the colorful flowers but we took a chance and ordered them anyways…well as you will see in the photo they did not look good! Nor was there enough to cover the whole bottom …errr….

Personally I really likes the dress without the flowers, but my girl had her heart set on having flowers on her dress…

  

So I tried just putting the flowers on the train, which didn’t look bad but my girl did not like that either…errr…lol

So then I suggested to just use two colors instead and the colors that looked the best with the dress were the orange and gold flowers and she liked that idea. So I had to exchange the other flowers for just the gold and orange and then order about 200 more to cover the whole bottom of the dress.

Honestly I was really hoping she would just nix the whole flower idea and just keep the dress plain because we were adding beads to the back of the dress and I felt that was enough for the dress..

I found some really nice gold sparkly beads and here I am trying to figure out how I was going to attach them to the dress! I watched the whole season of Empire doing this lol

So I did some mixing and matching and I saw a really pretty gold chain that I thought would look really nice on the dress and this is what I came up with and really liked but…

My prom girl did not like the gold chains lol and she wasn’t sure about the beads, she thought they were too gold..What?? lol but this was before she saw them in person and honestly these pics do not do this dress justice because the beads and sequins look gorgeous under the light!

So instead of stressing over about the beads I moved on to the part I was dreading the most which was sewing all these flowers to the bottom of the dress.

These flowers took me over 15 hours to sew!!

Flashback to 1996..after seeing Versace ads in Vogue magazine
“I want to be a fashion designer! You get to dress up, look fabulous, make other people look fabulous and go to cool parties”

And what I actually look like.. Hair pulled back, no makeup, grandma sweater and looking tired as hell sewing on a Friday night lol..smh

The final step ..sewing in the lining by hand…almost there 😀

Now for the grand finale!…Drumroll please….

 

    

The best part! A Happy customer 😉

For those of you wondering..this is the bra I got her on Ebay for $5.99! Love the packaging and Warning label lol

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