T-H-E Dress is finally done

Back in April, one of my previous customers made a special request that I was happy to oblige. She wanted to take the material from her daughter's blessing dress and use it on her baptism dress. (In our LDS faith your blessing dress is one you wear as a baby when your name is added to the records of the church, and the baptism dress is one you wear at age 8). The trick is that no 8 year old I know of is still the same size they were when they were an infant. After several months of designing and planning and sample dress making. This is what we came up with. She absolutely loved it. Since this is not my daughter, and out of respect for her mother, I have not included her face in these pictures. It was just finished this week.

The bodice and sleeves were cut out using Simplicity pattern 5704. With a slight variation on the sleeves. She loved the elastic band and gathered look of the cap sleeve and it made it easier on me not having to guess how wide around this little gals arms were. The only measurement I had was her waist size, and she was 200 miles away so there was no way we could have regular fittings. But it fits like a glove and I am so proud of it. The top layer of sheer fabric is from the blessing dress, and the mother's hope is to one day use that same section of fabric as part of her wedding veil, so I had to be extra careful with it so it can be used again sometime in the next 15 or so years. The bodice was cut out based on the 51" of tricot fabric that was usable from the blessing dress and then I had to remember my mad geometry skills to figure out where to put the split so you could see the layers underneath.

The little spots you see on the dress are little glass beads I hand-stitched to the bodice. The flower I melted by cutting out circles in satin in 4", 3", 2", and 1" increments and melting with a lighter. I wish the pictures were a better quality, but it was late at night in a kitchen, and the flash on my camera did not want to play nice.

Linking up to this week's link party over at Family Ever After