from Sketch to Finish: Recycled Graduation Dress

How long has it been from my last post? Well, long. Too long.

About six months perhaps? c:

It seems practical college and another tosen personal hobbies take all the energy and motivation completely away to post stuff online. Or... Ofcourse, I have taken pictures of many different artsy creations, but for some I don't really have the sketch or maybe proper pictures of the outcome... And for some awkward reason this damn blog likes to crash and delete my post when I'm almost finished. >:I

But without further ado or more silly excuses, here is one of my latest projects.

A recycled graduation dress. :)

Me and my dearest fellow course mate Tauri got a request to both choose some used clothings from A&D boutique, redesign them into graduations dresses, give a lil' interview, share our thoughts about graduation fashion and all of it was published as an article in Tartu Postimees 30.May, virtually published 2.June.

Definitely check out Tauri's glamour'licous blog of his designs, creations and other fashion related posts at:

I'm so glam i sweat glitters ♥

You can read the article here~ Estonian only tho.^^;
(and oh wow... I have never ever, ever received so many negative comments before. I mean seriously. What happened... :s)
(Okay, I get it, the pink dress was more or less okay as it was before. I was pretty surprised too that I could cut it up, but it should be obvious that these aren't meant as real graduation dresses. Hahaha~ Oh please. xD But I'm not sorry. I enjoyed the process and like the outcome. The model was super sweet and photoshoot even better than what I imagined.)

Onto my sweet pink dress~ First, here are the two dresses I got to use.

After staring at the two, here is what I came up with.

Ripped them apart- cut the pink dress in half, ripped up the ruffles, decorations; from the black dress cut the white laced part and pretty much shredded the black skirt part.

Started with the skirt. Since the material is pleated, tried to more or less equally pin it down on the mannequin...

...and stitched it together by hand. I wanted to use the second half of the skirt as sleeves, so had to stitch them in place too.

Over-locked the edged. Yup, with black thread. :D

The pieces will be connected with the black-white laced waist anyway, so didn't bother with the thread.

Stitched the black waist together with he skirt and over-locked them together.

Continued with the upper part. Tried to match the sleeves with the bust, stitched and over-locked together from the inside. Also, since this pleated fabric was quite impossible for me to handle... See those black over-lock seams at the edged of the sleeves? I folded them twice and carefully hand stitched them from the inside. No visible seams from the outside and~ The edge holds puffier~ c:

When the body part was done, sewed a couple of black straps from the black skirt, put them in place on the mannequin and connected them on the body.

How could I call a pink dress sweet n' cute without flowers or ruffles? :D

Curled up some ripped up ruffles as roses, stitched them together and sew on the dress.
Couldn't resist adding some white beads. ;) (even tho it's not visible on the photos...)