My beautiful dress

I know Mum has already written a post about my lacy dress, but I thought I should do one from my point of view.

Every winter my fire brigade has a formal Annual Dinner, always a fun night at which we recap the year that was and awards are presented etc. Me being me, I flatly refuse to wear the same outfit two years in a row-I KNOW no one but me will remember, but that's not the point. Besides, there's photos! Anyway, the past two years I've gone floor-length black numbers (one of which was a one shouldered skintight wowzer that Dad said I looked like a "1940's movie star" in, last years was a Zara dress that fitted so perfectly in the shop and made me look so tiny I couldn't leave it behind), so this year I decided to go a) colourful and b) short. I drew up a few designs of what I'd like, decided that it'd be too hard to find fabric and lace for and went shopping instead. In Bardot, I found almost the exact dress I wanted...except it didn't fit my boobs - no surprise there - and was far too expensive for my poor uni-student budget (just as a sidebar, I also found a super cute dress that I think will have to be Mum's next project). So I took photos in the mirror and showed Mum. This apparently cleared up a lot of questions about my designs...apparently I'm a worse artist than I thought. Whoops. Anyway, the day of the dinner I came home to find It waiting for me, calling my name and begging me to wear It. And wear It I did, with pride, feeling like the luckiest girl ever to have a Mum who can create such pretties just for me. All night I had to keep looking at it, and when I was standing up I kept twirling the skirt. 

It is GORGEOUS. A fine tuned, tailored, 'me' version of a dress I found in the shop. I knew it was meant to be when we went to Spotlight and found the perfect fabric AND perfect lace with no hassle. And, even better, it cost nearly half of what the ill-fitting dress in the shop would have cost me.

After many, many fittings of a toile (which is now going to be turned into a summer top, originally I thought the fabric was ugly and so 90's, but Mum has promised to pretty it up) to get the bodess fitting perfectly, a pattern was made by my clever mummy.This is doubly cool, because now we have the pattern for a top that suits and fits my shape. The skirt also proved troublesome, as somehow a size 12 skirt ended up being about a size 6 once the pleats were put in (my waist/bum is size 10, so in theory it should have fitted, in practice was another story). But, again, my clever Mummy fixed it and all worked. 

The main problem we had was fittings. As I'm not home often between uni, work, netball, karate and fire brigade, it was a trick to co-ordinate my flying visits to get clean clothes on between things and Mum's urge to sew. In the end, after the toile was done, Mum just did stuff to what she thought would fit and made me try it on, pinned in any changes then she could alter as she pleased when I wasn't there. She even managed to get the lace top almost just right without me being there (the shoulders need to be taken up about an inch). 

It is the prettiest dress, and I can't WAIT to have an excuse to wear it again! :)

Happy me in my BEAUTIFUL dress.