Sparkly Star Dress
This dress was originally started in fall 2019, and is the first piece I made custom for someone outside of theater. It was made for one of my good friends as a gift, to wear to a fancy event we intended to go to. Because of life changes, it wasn’t finished until August 2021. I learned a lot making this dress; it’s fitted in the bodice, and I definitely struggled with doing that for the first time, especially since it was finished partially remotely. It was also the first time I custom made sleeves, and at the time of making the pattern, I didn’t know about sleeve rulers. That’s definitely not an experience I had fun with, but it did drive me to do more research!
There are no worn photos to protect my friend’s privacy.
Design
We went through a lot of different ideas when trying to come up with the design for this dress. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the original sketches anymore, but I know we talked about a few different ideas: we knew we wanted it to be somewhat modern, since that’s more in line with my friend’s style, and we wanted to use some kind of interesting pattern. Originally, we talked a lot about doing something with flowers, but eventually, we decided on stars instead.
The base of the dress is made out of dark blue satin, and is a fairly simple dress with a sweetheart neckline, thin straps, and a full length circle skirt. The outer layer is gold mesh, which has pieces of glitter embedded in it. That was cut to make elbow length sleeves, which end in a star-shaped ruffle. Like the ruffle, the skirt also has five points, and at the longest points ends about three inches above the ground, to show off the blue under-dress.
Detail
A huge part of this dress is the detail on the edge of the skirt and on the sleeves. To create this effect, I bought several kinds of fabric with glittery gold stars (and a few moons, as seen below), and carefully cut each individual star out. On some stars, I left a little of the original mesh they were on, to create a ‘glow’ effect. I then spent some time arranging them according to what I and my friend liked.
To attach them to the dress, the stars were sewn down using free motion sewing, a technique usually used in quilting. Each star was carefully outlined with stitches, which kept them in place without the stitches showing up too much.
Acknowledgments
Thank you so much to my mom, who helped with the stars, was a great sounding board for tricky problems, and who let me cover her entire house in glitter! Thank you as well to my friend, for putting up with numerous fittings, changes, and mistakes!