Strapless dress with internal corset

The gold fabric of my dress looks much better in the evening when it seems to 'come to life'. In artifical light, it glows. Teaming it up with this retro style (fake) fur wrap made me feel quite like I was wearing an outfit from an old Elvis film - or was it because Elvis was on the radio when these pictures were taken?

The main dress didn't take 2 minutes to cut out and make up! The most difficult part was that each piece has to be cut out on the flat - ie: not the fold - in order to match the pattern up as nicely as possible. The pattern repeat on this fabric is quite large and not easy to match up exactly because of the lines of the dress.

The finished article was a little tight I must admit (my excuse which I'm sticking to is hormonal!). I had to insert the zip about 6 times - destroying 3 zips in the process!! In the end, I discovered that the problem was that although the dress is cut larger than the foundation, it needed to be taken out by a further half a centimetre before the zip would close over the foundation.

The belt was easy peasy to make - just a straight strip of stretch satin, gathered at each end and pinned together at the front with a vintage brooch.

I was very nervous about wearing a "home made" dress out to a posh function, but am glad I did. When I got there, I received a satisfying number of "oooh what a lovely dress" comments to make the hours of consternation and hand stitching totally worthwhile, and the satisfaction of knowing that apart from my time, this unique dress cost the grand total of about £20 to make, was priceless.

Click on pics to enlarge