It’s been about four years since I finished this dress, but for various reasons I never made a post about it, until now. I wore it twice for New Year’s Eves, and in the meantime it was happily resting in the closet. Now that the spring is back, I took it outside and snapped some pics of it hanging out with other spring blossoms in the garden. I won’t go into details about how I made the dress, but hopefully work in progress photos can give plenty of clues, so let’s start off at the beginning:
The flowers and leaves were mostly done after crochet-along videos again in Russian, by Elena Rugal and perhaps some others, along with some improvisation. In the last image, you can see the first step of creating the webbing with pinned down cord that follows the lines drawn on paper. It is also evident that I did not sketch out the whole design at this point, I designed as I went along, instead of blocking everything in at the beginning – it’s just the way I like to work when that option is viable for the project. This process continues and expands as I pin down more cords and flowers and crochet the webbing between them, like the spider.
The above images show how the top section of the front side was made. The motifs were pinned facing down, so that I had a better access to the parts of them where I connect the web to. The goal is to achieve the look of web being underneath the motifs, even though it doesn’t reach in there, but at least connection points should not be readily visible. The last image shows the completed section, unpinned from the cushion, with right side up. The reason I made this dress in sections is that the cushion wasn’t very large – it consists of two rectangular pieces of packaging foam wrapped in fabric and joined together – and I didn’t want it larger, since it is easier to turn it around as I work and doesn’t require a large work area. Pinning completed section down again is needed only when it is joined with another section.
The abundance of WIP photos hopefully paints a detailed picture of how this dress was made. The last photo was taken on February 12th of ’21. I did not take pictures of completed dress until just few days ago, and here they are:
Coming up next is another big project finished in ’23 that has never seen the light of the Internet, so stay tuned for a hand pieced millefiori quilt.