Alicia WIP - Custom Five-Inch Tall Bead Dress

Progress is going well, blogging types!

You may be familiar with my first two custom pieces and their creators:

Eumelia, designed by Guy2362.

Kerria, designed by Noire-Ighaan and Vinsuality, [for sale].

They were both especially enjoyable to make! Eumelia took 30 hours of pattern drawing to do, Kerria was done extremely loose from a pattern and admittedly I didn't write most of it down. Likewise, Eumelia is very particular in her detailing to be as similar to the original artwork as possible, and Kerria was done much more freestyle to implement elements into my beading.

Alicia is an unposted character from my dear friend GraniteFire, designed and modified with my bead dresses in mind. Now I can't claim credit for the inspiration itself - I didn't decide to do a bead dress from it until after I saw the finished piece - but GF was making some heavy hints on bead dresses beforehand so that's the story I'm going with, haha. GF modified the sleeves for me in the turnaround so that they wouldn't become "jagged" on the curve.

Alicia is based on a Hungarian traditional dress, according to the report from GF. She was described to me via text long before I saw her artwork, and I was hooked then. Alicia is also a character designed with an "infinite closet" so I imagine she may come back in through my design cycles in the future.

The first effort in creating Alicia was getting the correct beads together. GF is a very busy person by nature - the workaholic nature, that is. This created quite the delay between my excitement to create a new dress and actually ordering the beads. Indeed, Alicia was first brought to my attention January this year... her beads were not ordered until last month!

Eventually I got fed up with the wait and wanted to get my inspiration flowing again, haha. I had the white, red, brown, and cream in stock -- I even had the Crystaletts for her collar ready to go -- but the blue-grey color that dominates her gown escaped me.  I needed GF to be present for the shopping on those beads, and GF's incredible schedule kept getting in the way of that. Finally I pinned GF down: "THESE or THESE?" and showed pictures of the choices I'd found that closely matched. It was finally settled then, I'd be working with bronze-lined sapphire beads with a rainbow finish for the majority of the dress! I bought two tubes of Size 11 and one tube of Size 15.

Showing the rainbow-coating on the beads.

I've spent around ten hours creating Alicia's pattern. I've drawn from the base I created for Eumelia and recolored it (saving time) and then nabbed the skirt from The Ballerina for some heavy modification. I'd say two hours were spent on the bodice and the remaining eight have been on the skirt. There's going to be a faux layer for the apron's ruffles, the bow on the back, and of course the sleeves. I have no way of estimating how long that is going to take in pattern creation, but it goes to show I'm still far from finished.

I'm currently seven hours into beading and suspect I will be over twenty hours before I'm finished! The end result is going to be absolutely gorgeeeeousss though, I'm so confident about it!

Until next week, lovlies!
Pinky

Six Hour Progress