A Day in the Life of a Dress­mak­er and Fash­ion Designer

Have you ever won­dered what’s behind the vision and con­struc­tion of a beau­ti­ful dress? Hours and hours of labor? Yes. Cre­ative vision? Absolute­ly, but this cre­ativ­i­ty must also be firm­ly ground­ed in basics of tex­tiles and con­struc­tion tech­nique. This is why I am not just a fash­ion design­er. What I see in my head I know how to make real. I can hold fab­ric in my hands and, like gaug­ing its per­son­al­i­ty, under­stand what this fab­ric was made to do. And this means know­ing what not to do with cer­tain textiles! 

Last year, I agreed to sew three junior brides­maid dress­es for a new acquain­tance. At first, it seemed like a straight­for­ward project. The soon-to-be bride would send the fab­ric and pat­terns and I would make her dress­es for a small fee.

How­ev­er, this project turned into many addi­tion­al hours of work. I end­ed up doing every­thing from find­ing the exact silk faille that matched her brides­maid dress, buy­ing the fab­ric, pat­tern­ing mul­ti­ple pat­terns for each of the 3 girls, cre­at­ing and send­ing mock-ups, adjust­ing pat­terns, cut­ting the dress­es, send­ing pho­tos for design con­fir­ma­tions, sewing the final dress­es, and com­mu­ni­cat­ing back and forth with the cus­tomer bride-to-be. I tru­ly poured my heart into the project to help her cre­ate what she had envi­sioned and designed. After putting every­thing aside (can­celling a vaca­tion) and pulling a cou­ple all-nighters to make the bride’s dead­line (6 weeks before her wed­ding), I cre­at­ed what she designed in less than 3.5 weeks.

This blog shows just a bit of all the work that went into these dresses. 

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The junior brides­maid dress­es are made with silk faille, which is a thick ribbed silk. The silk is great for mak­ing struc­tur­al designs and dress­es, but not so great if you want to keep tex­tiles sur­faces smooth while in motion. The bride wished for the dress­es to be smooth and avoid wrin­kles. So to avoid the “crunch­i­ness” of the mate­r­i­al, I inter­faced, inter­lined, and lined the bodice and skirt of the dress. I used fine inter­fac­ing from Cana­da, unbleached cot­ton for the inter­lin­ing, and but­tery soft suede silk charmeuse for the lining.

The inter­lin­ing was pinned and bast­ed to the silk faille.

The dress was ful­ly lined with silk and the hem was fin­ished with hand stitch­ing and lace hem tape.

Each dress pat­tern was made from scratch. First, I cre­at­ed bespoke fit­ted body blocks from the mea­sure­ments we took over Face­time. After cre­at­ing the body blocks (one for each girl), I adjust­ed each body block pat­tern to an open back design.

After see­ing the mock-ups on the girls, we made adjust­ments to the pat­terns. I tweaked bodice lengths, arm­holes, skirt lengths, and necklines.

I made each mock-up with a dif­fer­ent skirt design. I thought this would help them visu­al­ize the design options and choose their favorite style.

Just before cut­ting their final dress­es, I made a dress with the cir­cu­lar cut skirt pat­tern in  black silk faille. (The cir­cu­lar cut was the design in the first dress pat­tern the bride wished to use.) How­ev­er, the silk faille didn’t drape as the bride imag­ined and she wished for some­thing that didn’t flare out quite as much. 

After drap­ing dif­fer­ent options, I ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to do four box pleats in the front and back.

The first bodice I sewed with the silk faille did not come out as nice as I wished. The dou­ble darts did not work well with the thick silk. So I went back the cut­ting table and draft­ed new bodices with princess seams. The princess seams worked much better!

The silk faille was very thick, so I did my best to try and keep things from being too bulky. How­ev­er, I didn’t trim the extra seam allowance in the side and back seams. I left about 2 inch­es in the seams in case the dress needs to be adjust­ed to a larg­er size in the future.

I added pock­ets to the dress­es. Not only would teenage girls love pock­ets for their cell phones, the silk faille is the per­fect dress mate­r­i­al for pockets!

The blue and green dress­es will look very nice for an Octo­ber sea­side wedding!