The whole bodice and belt of Carolyn’s dress will be beaded, and the belt is fastening with a vintage buckle, so I got to have lots of fun picking up sparkly pogey bait to show to Carolyn so she could decide what would go on the dress.
First, we picked buckles. The two best ones I could find were these:
Shown with NZ $1 and $2 coins for scale
Carolyn, having excellent taste, of course picked this one:
I love how the curves of the buckle echo the curves in the dress
A few of the diamantes need to be replaced, but that is easily fixable.
With the most important thing selected, we moved on to beads.
A spread of bead possibilities
Each bead will be centred on one of these beautiful, pearlised pailletes:
I love how shiny and subtle they are at the same time
The colours of the beads will range from silver beads on the design around the bust and on the sash, through to silver greys and clear glass beads.
Cut metal beads
The design around the bust will be in silver
The silver grey and pale grey glass beads will help to accentuate the curving lines on the bodice:
Vintage glass beads ranging from dark grey to clear
Clear beads will add extra sparkle:
Vintage clear glass beads
We had originally considered including dark gunmetal beads, but Carolyn decided that they were too stark, and might just look like flyspecks:
Gunmetal grey beads are a no-go
I loved the idea of gunmetal on a wedding dress, but I think that aesthetically, Carolyn is absolutely right.
We also vetoed some vintage pearl beads, because the colour was too yellow, and the shape was too different from the other beads:
Pretty pearl beads, but not for this dress
Thats OK, I think these might be perfect on the other wedding dress I am working on. Or I could just put them in my stash and admire them every once and a while!
I’ve already started using all these delicious beads on the dress, so I’ll show you images of that on Wednesday