Like most of my projects lately, I found myself on a crazy tight time schedule when making the Sleeping Beauty dress. I swear I’m not a procrastinator! Well… that’s a lie, I’m a horrible procrastinator. Even so, I’m also suuuuuuper busy all the time. From early Nov. straight through mid Jan. I spent almost every day in front of the sewing machine for at least 8 hours. Throw in the two trips to Kansas City, two family holidays, a craft show, and four finals all in this same time period I’m surprised I got anything done at all! With everything on my plate I only had the week between Christmas and New Years to get this dress ready for the party. A full ball gown in a week?… Pfft, no problem. School was out, I could totally do this /flexes.
In typical me fashion, I started by obsessing over the design concept. I know that I technically had a print out of the exact gown I wanted to make from the movie still, but there were things that I still needed to work out. Like how I wanted to go about making the overskirt, collar, and splashed designs.
For full disclosures sake, I should probably let you know that I started with Butterick Pattern 4453 as a base. It was a pattern I found in my stash, but it’s discontinued now.
It had the right basic shape and feel for the dress I wanted, but I had to alter it a ton to get the desired finished pattern. I think the only pieces I didn’t alter, tweak, or completely change were the two side panels of the skirt. Even then I should have added pockets! ***Why oh why do I always forget to add pockets ***
So, I started scouring the internet for ideas… Do you know how many really ugly adult Princess Aurora dresses there are out there? It’s really quite astounding.
I suppose that’s unfair. A lot of the cosplay dresses people created were really cute, but the official Disney Land/Disney World dresses were so obnoxious and weird. The ‘collar’ of the dress wasn’t even sitting on the shoulders where it was supposed to be.
See? Weird. It vaguely looks the same, but at the same time is totally unflattering and odd. And to top it off this was one of the only official blue dresses I could even find to compare directly with the original; almost all of them are Pink! I couldn't find a single one that resembled the splashed dress I was planning on making.
/sigh. I decided instead of looking at reference pictures from what other people had made, I’d simply wing it. Worst case scenario, I’d totally botch the whole dress and just wear mickey mouse ears to the party. No one would ever have to know.
I set about making my under corset and mockup of the bodice, which took about two days. I almost skipped making a mockup due to the time crunch, but I’m soooo glad I didn’t. With the under corset on, the original pattern had to be taken in and altered all over the place. Because of the way I planed to make the splashes there would have been practically no way to do this post construction, so my extra few hours of work saved me a lot of grief. I’m almost positive there would have been tears if I’d made the gown straight from the original pattern. Lesson of the day: Always make a mock-up!
With the fitting completed it was time to start sewing the actual dress…
Click here for Princess Aurora's Pink and Blue Gown - Part 3
Click here for Princess Aurora's Pink and Blue Gown - Part 4
Click here for Princess Aurora's Pink and Blue Gown - Part 5
Click here for Princess Aurora's Pink and Blue Gown - Part 6
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What do you think of the Disney World dresses? Am I just crazy, or do you think they look slightly weird too?
