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Custom Wedding Dress & Kimono Upcycled Clothes | オーダーメイドウェディングドレス&着物ドレス

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Kayla’s Engagement Dress

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cody_kayla00103Sometime last year, I worked on making an engagement dress for Kayla. She recently sent me these gorgeous photos of her engagement photo sessions. She looks beautiful and happy in the dress! I am so thrilled. I didn’t do engagement photos for Andy and myself, mostly because I didn’t know such thing existed! In Japan, it is not terribly common, and also we were young and broke (We were 22). Kayla’s photos made me wish we had the chance!

cody_kayla00011 cody_kayla00018 cody_kayla00046 cody_kayla00063kayla's engagement dress1cody_kayla00065 cody_kayla00092 cody_kayla00129 cody_kayla00140 cody_kayla00203 cody_kayla00209kayla's engagement dress2 Photos by Q Avenue Photos – More photos here.

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Collaboration Dress with Already Pretty

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A while back, I asked Sally of Already Pretty to come up with a variation of her favorite dresses from my shop. If you don’t know Sally, I recommend checking out her website – her site is full of useful shopping information, and she is all about embracing who you are and your shape and figure. For the collaboration, she chose my 50’s inspired plaid dress.

She gave me the above mood board to work with. It’s funny that many of my customers ask me to make long sleeved dresses, whereas I prefer sleeveless. It is always a challenge to draft patterns for sleeves and sew them. Overall I’m happy with the outcome. I lowered the neckline, added cropped sleeves and to make things interesting, I used the plaid fabric on bias. The act of cutting the plaid on bias was a challenge since I have to match the patterns!

Here is Sally’s review of the dress I made for her and here is a similar dress in shop.

Minnie Halloween Costume for a Girl

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Have you decided what you or your little ones are going to be for Halloween? I’m more excited about Halloween this year than any other year in the past because I have my little girl to play dress-up 🙂

This Minnie costume is not for Kiko, but I borrowed it for the sake of taking the photos. I made this for my friend’s daughter. She has a tradition of going to the Tokyo Disney Land with her daughter every fall, and dresses her daughter with a little Minnie mouse costume. Last year I made this dress for her. This year, she sent me her sketch, so I made a dress based on it. Her sketch has a white round collar, big polkadot baby doll dress with puff sleeves and tutu underneath of the dress to fluff it up.

I didn’t use any patterns; I traced an existing dress that fits Kiko well and added a bit more room and seam allowances. For round collar though, I did make a paper pattern so that they fit accurately. I like this tutorial on how to draft round collar patterns.

I added a sash in the back, and invisible zipper for closure. I made it a bit short so that the tutu will peek out at hem.

One problem I came across was pre-washing the fabric. I almost always pre-treat the fabric before I work on it, so I soak this polkadot fabric in a cold water first. Then I realized that the red color dyed the white dots! I wash it for three times, tried the detergent but the color did not come off. So the white dots are dyed in pink! I did a quick internet search on how to fix/avoid this problem, but no reasonable solutions were found.. Anyone has any advice? I think it was the right decision to wash the fabric even though the dots were dyed in the process, because if I hadn’t, the white collar would have been pink too.

My friend emailed me that her daughter loved the dress. I’m thrilled!