My Prom Dress

Hello everyone,

so, I know my prom was quite a long time ago, but I thought I would share my prom dress on here with you. I hand made my prom dress by myself while revising and doing my GCSEs. I am so glad that I did decide to make my prom dress in the end as it was so rewarding to get to wear something that was so individually you and that no one would have ever seen before, even though it was quite stressful. I had given myself a very big-time frame to make it in as I knew that I would only really have a couple of hours a week to make it and it was a very slow prosses.

I started off by finding a pattern that I liked, this took quite a long time as I had a specific idea of the style of dress I wanted, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find one that was actually what I wanted, or I would have to adapt a pattern to my style. Luckily, I was able to find one that was in the style I wanted and then I had to pick the fabric. I absolutely love fabric shopping, but I get distracted by all the pretty fabrics, so I never come out with what I actually went in for and this meant it took some time. I knew that I wanted there to be a net overlay with some sort of embellishment or embroidery on it so I started by looking online for that, I knew that it would be very had to find a fabric like this in a shop, but the whole prosses of ordering a sample and then it arriving took a long time so if anyone was planning on doing this I would recommend setting aside a good amount of time to find the fabric you want. I finally found this beautiful net fabric with sequin stars sewn onto that I absolutely loved and as soon as I saw it I knew it would be perfect. Now it was time to choose a fabric to go under the net, I did this by getting some fabric swatches and I tested them out underneath the net and I decided on a subtle cappuccino coloured fabric. 

Now it was time to start the making, I made a mock up so that I could check that I liked the style and size, to my surprise the dress actually fitted really well so I didn’t have to make any alterations which meant I saved quite a lot of time. Once the mock up was finished it was time to start the real thing, this was so scary as it meant I had to cut the fabric but once I started I could not stop. It was a very long prosses cutting out the fabric as I had to cut out two of everything and be very precise. I started the whole process off to start constructing the dress by just following the instructions and taking it very slow so that I could make sure that everything was perfect. While making this dress my style in what I wore changed quite a lot as my confidence in my body grew, this meant that I changed lots of things in the dress design to suit me. To start with the dress was going to have sleeves made out of the net however once I had put the sleeves in I actually really didn’t like how they looked so I took them out and made the dress sleeveless. Also, the dress had a round neck line, but I didn’t like it, so I changed it quite last minute to be a v neck line which was a lot more flattering. As well I had issues with the zip, I had used an invisible zip, but I had slightly over sewn the zip and sewn over the teeth, so I actually got stuck in the dress and had to unpick the zip and sew in a whole new zip. The dress was fully lined inside, and I had worked very hard to make sure that it was perfect inside out and once I had finished my GCSEs I spent every minuet neatening the seams inside mainly by hand, the inside was basically perfect, and I could have worn it inside out. 

I actually only finished my dress the day before prom which was such a relief that I has got it finished in time.  I absolutely loved how my dress turned out and I really didn’t want to take it off. It was amazing to make my dress as I could make it so me and no body will ever have the same dress of me which I absolutely love.

I hope you have enjoyed looking at my work and thank you for reading.

Amy xxx