Dress Challenge 2011 - Month of June - Asian Inspired

This month's dress challenge was to design a dress that might appear in Asian art.

Dress Up Challenge 2011 - Peter Paul Rubens

I created this for the Dress Up Challenge 2011.  This month our inspiration was the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens.  Rubens created lush paintings of ladies who didn't watch their waistlines.  And judging from the number of ruffs ladies in his paintings are wearing, the ladies weren't worried about comfort either!  The ruff was a very fussy collar-type accessory containing innumerable highly-starched loops.  They took a LOT of fabric to create!  And they could not have been comfortable.  I felt that my dress just had to contain a neck ruff.

That ruff took me hours to create!  I first tried to create it out of paper, but I found out very quickly that paper would not be the way to go with such a small ruff.  So I settled for ribbon and I didn't cut a length - I just started looping it and left the ribbon on the roll, not cutting until I was done.  I probably used about half of the ribbon roll!  The rest of the dress was easy by comparison.  I decided to use Juliet's fantastic dahlia fold tutorial to dress up the skirt.

Dress Challenge 2011 - April - Art Deco

The theme for Dress Challenge 2011 for the month of April is Art Deco.  Now you're talking!  Art Deco is one of my very favorite styles.  It has all of the glamour of the 20's, culminating in the 1939 World's Fair, which boasted many buildings built in the Art Deco style.  My dress design was inspired by one of the first trading cards I ever created, which was based on the 1939 World's Fair.  Here is that card:

I based the design of that card on a picture of an Art Deco mirror that I found.

And here's my dress:

I used Miyuki Delica Beads for the gown's straps and also to decorate the front of the dress. 

And the back of the dress features an Art Deco design piece, which is actually a Vintaj earring finding:

Here's my original sketch for the dress.

Dress Challenge 2011 - Impressionism

Thank you, Angela, for carrying on with this terrific challenge, Dress Challenge 2011.  Dress Challenge 2010 was so much fun - and the 2011 version is shaping up to be just as much fun!  The theme for January is impressionism.  I created my dress inspired by one of my favorite VanGogh paintings:

I would truly love to own this dress!  I painted it with watercolor and gouache, in the true spirit of impressionism.  After painting it, I really couldn't see any way to improve upon Van Gogh's inspiration.