Construction Details:

(Made for Seta Ginny as pictured lol)
A few yards of black-shot-green taffeta, and about 600 swarovski crystal beads hand-sewn on. Lined in one of the black dull satins from Joann's Casa Collection. Other than there being a fair amount of draping to get the skirt to do what I wanted to and having the headache of trying to fit a bodice to someone based on measurements and an in-person-fitting-adjusted muslin that half of the chalk marks rubbed off and pins fell off it, it wasn't that hard of a dress....well, except for the beads. Lots of time on that.

Learned a lot about Swarovski's lineup in the process (which is probably semi-useless to me lol), and this dress includes all sorts of colors/shades...Crystal, Crystal AB, Vitrail Light and Medium, Jet, Jet AB, Jet/Hematite, Black Diamond, Black Diamond AB, Silver Shade, Crystal Moonlight, etc. 2mm, 3mm, 4mm Rounds and the large 8mm Rondelle.
I also probably lost a fair amount of the super-tiny 2mm beads into the carpet and everywhere else.

Shoes were painted with Popsicle Green Angelus Leather paint. Need to touch them up, something weird happened on the last coat after they dried to make them get all streaky and I didn't notice until too late. I still love Angelus for painting shoes regardless..

Bec head was the taffeta flipped the other way, satin-stiched and appliqued. I'm thinking of redoing it in a brighter green and a little smaller and slightly further down and to the right (left). I was going for a "classy" look but it just doesn't pop out very well, and it's a little too big and far up/over compared to the design. Eh, I hand-sewed it on for that reason.

Personal Thoughts:

LOTS OF BEADS. ARGH. When I saw this dress the first thing I thought was "man, that whole "black that shines green" look would be perfect with that shot taffeta that I thought would be a great idea to use for my zoro pants that one time for the same reason back in the day (note: it was not actually a good idea for zoro's pants)". Then my second thought was "I bet it would look awesome if all of the "stars" were shiny crystal beads". This was enough to drive me to make it for my friend Ginny (Seta Ginny on here). That and I've wanted to make a dress for someone for a bit just to get practice making stuff for other people and girls are harder to work on than guys.

Making the dress using only the taken apart remnants of my Zoro pants and bandana, plus about a yard of leftover fabric, was very interesting... Required some creative piecing and patterning, and I didn't get the exact shape I wanted but at least it was close enough. Doesn't help that I bought the fabric like 5 years ago at Mary Jo's when I just happened to be near it in NC visiting a friend (never been back to the store since then, couldn't find anything quite like it again no matter how much I looked. Everything was Green with a black highlight, rather than vice-versa.

I will probably never hand bead something again, at least not to this level. It was my first time and I never expected it to take as long, or as many beads as it did. Even the "this should be more than enough" totally wasn't. Plus, I didn't have the patience to do each bead individually and did kind of a ghetto running chain which led to a few odd issues here and there, as well as less bead-loosening-protectiong.

On the other hand, Dharma's Milsoft industrial fabric softener is amazing and made the somewhat papery taffeta wonderfully soft and flowy. Do recommend. It also made it ridiculously easy to iron and steam the taffeta without any issues or spotting.

Sorry, you must be a registered user of and logged in to view and add comments. Either log in or register now!