Lovely Dress Embellishment

Although it's been a while since I've embellished clothes it's something that I really love to do. Once I get into that embellishment mood it's one of those things that'll take over my whole day. I get so absorbed in my work and am so curious to see the end result that I'll usually work on an embellishment project nonstop. Then before I know it it's all done! :-) It's fun and

relaxing for me as well so it doesn't really feel like work to me. Anyway, it was recently that I got into one of these embellishing moods, which I did along with cutting and hemming a dress. The green dress that you see in the pictures was originally much longer. I'd say that I cut off at least six inches worth of material. That involved cutting both the outer cotton fabric and an inner polyester-like fabric that was used as an inner skirt for lining. I didn't want the fabric to fray after hemming so I first folded over the fabric on the outer and inner skirts and then hemmed them. Those details aren't shown in the pictures but I just thought that they were worth mentioning. Anywho.....as far as the embellishing goes, it was simple, just time consuming. I had a bunch of really pretty green glass beads that I sewed in layers of two for a couple of rows on the dress bust. After that I thought that a thinner layer of beads would be a good way to trim off the embellishment. I didn't want the dress to look like it was too heavily beaded. I also didn't want it to literally be heavy with beads to the point that it would be weighed down at the top.

You usually don't think of things like that when you start to embellish, but after doing it a few times you learn to factor in the weight of your beads against the fabric. It helps to avoid what I call "the droopage". :-)