Elsa’s Frozen Fever Dress-Part 2

After a writer’s block last week, I finally finished the last post about how I made Elsa’s Frozen Fever dress! Although this is the last post about the dress, the posts about the shirt and cape will not be posted for a while because I have yet to work on them. XD

In my last post, I talked about sewing the dress together and talking about how I sewed the shirring into the back of the dress. Today, I’ll talk about sewing sequins onto the dress and finishing the dress.

Like I said, I sewed sequins onto the dress. The idea of Elsa wearing a super sparkly green dress for Anna’s birthday seemed like something Elsa would do. The pattern I used for the dress, Simplicity 1094, was designed for sequin fabric for the bodice only. I considered doing this, but I wanted the dress’ sequins to look like Elsa’s dress in the movie. In the movie, the sequins on Elsa’s dress stretched bellow the waistline.

The bodice for the pattern I used, Simplicity’s 1094, was designed for sequin fabric and does not stretch bellow the waist. This wasn’t a concern for me because I’ve had experience sewing sequins onto a dress that was not designed for hand sewn sequins (Anyone remember the Rose Tyler Idiot’s Lantern dresses?). I don’t have photos of this, but I put the dress on my dress form and drew the lines where I wanted the sequins to go.  Everything went well, but I did have a problem I did not foresee.

While drawing the lines on the dress for the bottom of the sequined section of the dress, the water soluble marker I used disappeared in the fabric after 24 hours. It was weird because the maker never did that before on any kind of fabric, including the type of poly satin. I think the problem was the color of the satin. I never used the maker on green fabric before, so the maker, which is a blue color, disappeared into the fabric. Once I realized what happened, I redrew the lines and sewed lines of sequins that follow the lines I drew.

After that, I started to sew sequins onto the section of the dress I wanted the sequins in. I began sewing the sequins onto the bottom right corner and worked my way up the skirt and bodice. This worked well because it made the sequins lay in straight lines all the way across the dress.

After a few weeks of work, the dress looked like this…

In order to help me keep the rows of sequins straight between the transition from the skirt to the bodice, I stopped sewing sequins at the waist of the dress to give me a chance to examine the dress, the way the sequins are laying, and how I should proceed sewing the sequins onto the bodice.

Once I figured out how I wanted the sequins to be sewn onto the bodice, I began working on the bodice. Based off my experience sewing sequins, I knew I’d have trouble sewing sequins over the bust. Although I’ve sewn sequins onto bodices before without any problems, the curve of this bust was different than other dresses I’ve worked on. Because of this, I needed to change the way I sewed the sequins.

To solve this problem, I sewed the sequins onto the bodice in straight lines until I reached the point in the bodice where the under bust is located. Then I sewed the sequins around the curve of the bust so it would make darts. After I was done, the bodice looked like this…

Once that was done, I finished sewing the sequins in the darts and sewed the lining to the bodice.

The only thing left to finish on the dress was to hem the skirt. I waited to finish the bodice before I cut trimmed the skirt. At first I wasn’t sure if I wanted the dress to have a huge train, but I ended up liking the idea so I made the train of the skirt larger than the pattern called for.

After I hemming the skirt by sewing bias tape to the hem by hand, I finally completed the dress!

Well, that’s all I have for my Elsa Frozen Fever costume! I’m very pleased with the way the dress turned out and how it looks. I hope the undershirt and cape look just as good as the dress!

Thank you for reading!