FOUNDATIONS REVEALED COMPETITION ENTRY
A Sprinkle of Purple Petals
(click images to to enlarge)
Other Credits
My own facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charlotteauroradesign
Outline the story …
I love flowers! I add flowers to almost everything I make.
For this corset dress, flowers come into play in several ways. Firstly, through the flower embroidered silk. The bottom of the dress is also made to look like a flower. It is made of big flower petals in several layers. The petals gets bigger throughout the layers.
For making this dress, I challenged myself to just go crazy and not taking into consideration that this had to be suitable for human needs but more like wearable art. And that is what it turned out to be. This is a dress that you cannot pee while wearing. You cannot sit nor walk either. Mostly, you can just stand and swirl in the wind, looking fabulous and waiting for someone to come pick you up and carry you somewhere else – much like a real flower.
The dress is worn by my beautiful model, Khalisa Mo. Unfortunately, we forgot to photograph the back while she was wearing the dress, so that is only shown on the mannequin.
Outline the construction…
I constructed the pattern for this dress myself, starting with a regular corset pattern that I had drafted previously. While cutting the fabric, I made sure to carefully pattern match the flowers on the front and back.
The dress consists of three layers: silk and coutil roll pinned together with a cotton lining on the inside. The skirt on the bottom is made of a tulle skirt with big petals on top. The petals are longer in the back than in the front. All the petals are gathered at the top to make them more voluminous.
The most challenging aspect of making the dress was figuring out the work flow for sewing it together. I had to ensure that every edge/seam was sealed off in a beautiful way, both on the inside and outside. The point where the bias tape in the front is sealed off at the shoulder part was particularly tricky to get right.
All seams are topstitched and has a boning channel. There are also boning channels inside some of the panels. Making sure these were sewn straight and ended evenly at the bottom took a lot of concentration as well.
The back has a very long modesty panel that is laced into the dress all the way down and there are 20 meters of lace in the back. The modesty panel has a straight lace down the middle. Between every “lace cross” the straight lace is attached to the modesty panel. Figuring this out took forever.
This is absolutely stunning.
Thank you so much 😀
Wonderful construction job!….and color!….and you look like a goddess in it! !
Thank you for the compliments 😀
Alas, it is not myself wearing the dress – It’s too small for me.
I was so fortunate to get this beautiful woman to model for me! Her name is Khalisa Mo, but she doesn’t have a modelling page I could credit 🙂
Oh my Faerie Godmother, the fit you have achieved?! It’s stunning, this gown is double chef’s kiss!
Thank you very much, I really appreciate it!! 😀 It was definitely not easy getting the fit it has! But it turned out to be an advantage that the silk is a tiny, tiny bit flexible. It made it a bit easier to roll pin the parts together, all the way from the shoulder, down to the knee, without creating any wrinkles 😀