Sunday, September 14, 2014

Mirabilia's Dressmaker's Daughter: Mostly Finished! + Onwards

Greetings my lovely readers,

This week marks the finalization of the time consuming project I started in January! With 263 hours of stitching and 26.5 hours of beading, a total of 289.5 hours, it's finally all come together. I'm saying "mostly" at the top because I want to figure out a saying / phrase / quote to go along the bottom with my signature. It was quite the journey with many progress photos along the way, but all my patience has paid off!

I'm smiling back there, I swear!

With the last pieces coming into place I went back to station #1 (in front of the laptop in my room) to do some pattern designing and work on some biscornu prototypes. Not the best idea I ever had, to be honest. I gathered up all my patterns and then realized after two (or three?) weeks of doing nothing but cross-stitch that I wouldn't be able to calmly work on designing a biscornu's folding.

Before I left for station #2 (my work table in front of the TV), I started work on a custom collaboration pattern between me and GraniteFire. Originally we had planned on GF creating a lady wearing a dress made of wine, and I had all sorts of ideas to make the dress in silk and metallic threads and her hair lined with silvers and golds. We ran into a sort of road block though since liquid is very difficult to shade and I believe the project is mostly abandoned since April.

So in alternate, I grabbed up GF's most recent posting of improvement art and fed her through my program. It spit out over 200 colors required and I've been slowly reducing it; now I'm around 140. The most difficult bit of this has been maintaining the shading of all of GF's beautiful work. The program seems to think this requires about twenty shades of white to accomplish and reducing them has been a happy task.


When I got over to station #2 I started up on a dress I thought would originally be for myself, but am thinking it may have the possibility of being sold to a local shop in town come October. The shop is really pretty and really pink - just my kind of place!

I'm revisiting the first five-inch-tall bead dress I ever did and she remains one of the most time consuming patterns I have. The bodice took six hours! I'm now at ten hours as I post this and I haven't yet reached the lacey sections of the skirt!

Until next week,
Ashley Mae
Pinky

4 comments:

  1. I'll say it again, it's sooooo beautiful, also I can't wait to see the finished pink dress.

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  2. Dress is looking good so far ^_^ And, again, LOVE the finished dresses with those beads! ^_^ You know what you're going to do with it as far as framing yet? I'm sure it will be stunning. :)

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  3. I don't have any more words to express how very, very, amazingly pretty Dressmakers Daughter is (there! I did it again!), and this new bead dress is coming along so nicely as well; the pink and black work really well together ^_^

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  4. Your beading skills continue to wow me to no end and more so after I tried a simple beading technique that most would be able to do and I cannot....you are my idol!

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