Arwen's Requiem Dress

6.18.04
As of today, I have gathered all materials except for the lower sleeve fabric and I finished the beading on one of the upper sleeves. I have also taken a few pictures. I can already tell that this velvet is going to be really hard to photograph. It looks dark in the pictures, but it's really not that dark. Here's a picture of my fabrics and trim (I realized later that I accidentally labeled the underdress trim as the overdress trim and vice versa. Sorry about that):

For beading on the sleeves, I'm tracing the pattern onto tear away interfacing and beading over that. The fabric is two layers: a navy blue chiffon and blue silk essence. The silk essence "lightens" the color of the chiffon. Here are a few pictures, the fabric and beads, in progress beading, comparison:

8.5.04
I've been working on my dress for a while....the underdress was a complete disaster. It just fit horribly, but I came up with a solution! I cut two new pieces out of the skirt and made the underdress into a sort of "slip." Tomorrow I will put the sleeves in it. The overdress has been coming along nicely. Tomorrow I will put the zipper in and sew the side seams.

8.8.04
Finished! I'm so happy to finally be through with this. Below I will put some pictures of the finished dress, plus a few "in progess" shots I've taken over the past few days. I'm not really happy with the way the pictures with me in them turned out - they're kind of blurry and badly taken. I'll blame that on the fact that I had to use the self timer since nobody else was around.

Underdress.	Underdress after the sleeves were attached.	Dress without the trim.