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A Whole New World

Posted by Cassandra Atkins on 1st Jul 2019

A Whole New World

This next dress was my second dress I started for for Montana-Jane. I must admit it did take a very long time to finish as I had know Idea what I was really doing I just know I could do it, and even then I never actually finished it. She was skating to "A Whole New World" from the Disney Movie Aladdin as Princess Jasmine, as all little girls do go though thew whole Disney Princess thing.

I had just discovered all the wonderful Rhythmic gymnastics leotards on Pinterest which completely blow my mind, and thought I would give it a crack as I had done plenty of aplique type projects since I was a small child. Firstly I made a paper pattern for the design I was going to attempt and I painstakingly cut each colour out bit by bit with a pair of scissors and pinned it all down.

This is NOT how I do it any more BTW. I also found online these great gold iron motifs that tied in nicely with the rest of the design. I straight stitched the edges down as at this point I only had industrial machines and no zig zag stitches available. Being stretch fabric I did stretch it a bit whilst sewing so all the stitching wouldn't pop what she put it on. It didn't take anywhere near as long as it took to cut it out. I purchased some fabric paint from my local Spotlight store in which I added but when Montana put the dress on it stretch it out and it just fell off, so I didn't use fabric paint again until many years later.

I purchased I whole heap of different sizes and colours of Swarovski crystals. I was every excited about this and I spent weeks at the rink crystalling this dress. The fine detail was exactly that, fine. Hours and hours spent and once I saw it on the ice I must admit I was a little devastated. Whilst it was very sparkly and sunglasses where needed to look at it when the light shined on it, but you could not see any of the detail I had slaved over. It got to a point where I just decided to stop because know one would ever know that I hadn't finished the arms LOL and to this day this dress never was finished. I made the head pieces to finish it off and that was that.

The part I liked the most about this dress was the back, I went on to use this same style on future dresses and I still use it today. I also loved the coins I added to the skirt, they jingled when she skated which was really cute. The coins I added around the waist were also attached with gold beads. Whilst they did looked great, because she wore the dress and ran around in it after skating, she would get the coins stuck in between the chairs and we lost a few. I wouldn't also use tassels on a dress again, they looked great the first few times she wore it but soon got a bit ratty. If we owned a steamer then maybe I could of kept them looking a bit nicer. But all in all I was pretty please with my second attempt of a figure skating dress.