Construction on Shell’s dress began with draping a very basic princess-seamed bodice, and with working out some very complicated sketches for a skirt design that gets fuller as it goes back and is made out of a chiffon fabric that isn’t bias-grain seam friendly. I know.  Most unexciting drafting photos ever. The front of the skirt was a bit of a problem, because the fabric was quite narrow, and so drapey that seamlines cut on the bias tended to warp.  I needed to find a way to make the skirt very full at the hem, without minimal seamlines across the bias of the grain, and within the narrow fabric width. I drew up a few skirt front ideas: I ended up going with an option not show: cutting a narrow-ish centre front panel, and then two wide side panels, which did leave me with two very tricky almost-bias side front seams. The practical me said I should have gone with a 4th option: a half circle for the front. It wouldn’t have given quite as …

I’ve actually gone about telling you about Shell’s dress slightly backwards.  You see, before we finalised a design, we went looking for fabric.  It’s often easier to fine fabric you like and design a dress around it, than to design a garment and hope you can get the right fabric. So, fabric shopping. As I mentioned before, Shell didn’t want a white wedding dress. Her dream dress fabric was ice blue silk taffeta, but unfortunately ice blue isn’t a fashionable colour at the moment.  We looked everywhere for ice blue silk of pretty much any description, to no avail.  And we were on a serious schedule: 6 weeks from engagement to wedding. Then one of my favourite fabric stores, The Fabric Warehouse had a 50% off moving sale, so we hurried off to it to see if there was anything nice in it. First we found a bolt of beautiful dove grey super-lightweight silk crepe.  And, on the $1 a metre table, a bunch of ice-sea blue stretch cotton.  So we bought 10 metres of …

Guess what? Shell’s getting married! Remember Shell?  She was on the South Island Road Trip, and the tramp of evilness and has modeled the Japonisme dress, and the nougat corset. And now she’s going to wear one of my dresses for her wedding! First we had to decide what her wedding dress would look like.  Some clients come to me with a clear idea, but sometimes we work through a design process.  This was the latter. The first thing that played into the dress design was the ceremony location: Shell is getting married at Rivendell.  OK,  Kaitoke Regional Park, but it’s exactly where they filmed Rivendell for Lord of the Rings.  It’s a stunning location, and Shell and her fiance are both total geeks, so I wanted to create a modern day Elf-Queen dress for Shell.  Something that looked like it would be worn by an elf, but without being costume-y Shell wasn’t sure what she wanted her dress to be like, but she knew she didn’t want a white dress.  We looked a bunch …