Three Dresses

Well! It has been a surprising summer of dresses for me...although not the dresses I had originally intended to make for myself. I spent most of the summer making Adreanna's wedding dress (which you already knew). But I thought I'd share some pics of her dress in the making:

I took these pics on the day I delivered the dress to her. I altered the color so that maybe you could see a little of the lace detail.

Most of the work of her dress was because I was taking this lace...

...and cutting it and arranging it to look like this.

The first two pieces of lace are sewn onto the front of the bodice! Only a zillion more to go!
If you look closely you can see the large stitches I basted in to show where I wanted to sew the lace on. (I had marked it with disappearing ink, but the ink disappeared too fast for me to finish the work!) I pinned the dress pieces to my ironing table to keep it flat, and then stitched all of the flower chains on by hand.

Here's the front, almost finished. If you see lace with a pin stuck in it, it still needs to be stitched down.

I did the train the same way as the bodice, stitching the flowers down by hand. The edge laces were basted on by hand, but permanently put in their place with the sewing machine.
(Again, the weird picture color is so that maybe you can see a little detail.)

detail on the back bodice

And here you can see the front bodice detail (or some of it).
And the happy couple! Aren't they cute?

I am pretty pleased with the way Adreanna's dress turned out, and even more pleased that she was so happy with it. Yay!

But it's the next two dresses that amazed me. These are dresses that I made four years ago, and thought I'd never see again.

You may remember that when we moved into our new house two of the dresses from my Pianoforte collection disappeared. We looked through every box, we searched the house we moved from, and we searched our new house. Gone. I was pretty sure they must have ended up in the landfill somehow. One of those dresses I had never been satisfied with, and it was awaiting alterations from me. But the other was the flagship dress of the line; everyone's favorite (including mine). I was not happy.

This is what missing
dress number one
was supposed to
look like. Lovely,
don't you think?

Well, the week after the wedding I got a bee in my bonnet to clean the garage. It was still housing a bunch of boxes that needed more permanent homes. So we went through every box, and unpacked, put away, or rearranged everything we found. Finally I got to a big, red tote. I opened it up and found a bunch of books—as expected, because I'd looked in this tote in the search for the missing dresses. I started taking books out so that I could put them in their new home (which was actually a different box, for now) and underneath a good twenty pounds of books I saw a light blue sheet... The very sheet I'd wrapped the dresses in to keep them clean. So I tossed the books aside, snatched up the bundle of blue sheet, and sure enough! There were my dresses! I squealed! I snatched them up! I was ecstatic!

Now, I have to tell you that I would never have piled thirty or more pounds of books on top of those dresses. Someone else must have packed up that tote. Nevertheless, I am glad they are back! And now they are hanging in my closet, safe and sound.

Amazing!