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A Beautiful Rose

Posted by Cassandra Atkins on 8th Jul 2019

A Beautiful Rose

This blog isn't so much about the dress but where the inspiration for the dress came from and the place it took us. The more my daughter skated the more I saw the little girl I knew, that I thought I had lost. Who would have ever thought that something like figure skating would be so therapeutic for a little damaged soul.

I was at my wits end with what to do to help my little angel and was in talks with her school on getting her some sort of counselling and was questioning my parenting skills and blaming myself for her mental trauma. The very next day she put on a pair of skate boots and this was the day her mindset changed.

In my first blog I touched a little bit on my daughter's mental heath and explained how watching her skate for the first six months was like watching a dried up rose slowly come to life and bloom again.

This is why I used red roses on her first technical dress. The song she skated to was 'The Power of Love' by Gabrielle Aplin whilst this song was maybe a bit too mature for her I thought, for some reason she just lived in the moment of this song and brought all the emotions she wanted to express into her program.

I guess skating gave her an outlet to express herself without using words. I was and still am a single mother and whilst this sport was costing me a small fortune I decided so would some sort of therapy so we just ran with it.

So the positives from our dark place is that where there is darkness light can soon follow. It was through Frozen Couture the light inside my Montana was ignited again and I got my fun-loving cheeky monkey back.

This was the first time I had made flowers out of fabric as all the other times I had made them out of beads, ribbons and embroidery thread.

I kept this dress as simple as I could as the last one was very much over the top and this was to be her first technical program.

It was very hard for me to hold back as I love to go all out and to make everything I do to be the best (and often most flamboyant) it can be, I guess that is the Leo in me!

I found the chiffon first from a shop call GJ's Discounts fabrics and thought it was very mature and pretty and because it was the last few meters of it I grabbed it.

I have learnt over the years if you find a fabric you like even if you have no purpose for it yet you must get it as when you do figure out what you could of done with it, or a client comes with a great idea and it would be perfect for it, it will not be available when you go back to get it and trust me that feeling is just devastating.

I had decided after staring at it for a few hours that this could work for Montana's dress, I just had the problem of matching the body to the fabric as I didn't think yellow would be a nice colour on her and still to this day I am not a fan of yellow.

But this dirty/mustard yellow velvet seamed to work well with the dress as long as I had the red crystals and flowers on it to off set the yellow I could see this working. I must say doing those hand made velvet flowers was a very time consuming task at hand but the effect was what I was after and it was once again a learning process.

I have since then learnt much about baby lock and how to edge chiffon much neater but it doesn't seem to make much difference in how hard chiffon is to sew. Chiffon is not my friend!! But on the ice it looks magical so the lessons on chiffon are still a to be continued affair in my work shop!

I also edge the skin fabric these day and don't leave it raw. It has taken a long while to figure out the best way to edge it but I will leave that lesson for another day. Montana LOVED!!! her dress and from a rose she turned into a shining star, my little star.