Pub­lished 06/18/2014

One of the ben­e­fits of sell­ing on the web is reach­ing peo­ple worldwide!

I was recent­ly con­tact­ed by a bride in Aus­tralia about mak­ing flower girl dress­es for her July (win­ter) wed­ding. Instead of a Chan­til­ly lace for the leo­tards, she chose the alen­con lace I had in stock. As beau­ti­ful as the lace was, I had nev­er used the lace and was appre­hen­sive about cut­ting and design­ing the first leo­tard. But for­tu­nate­ly, the lace worked real­ly well. I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by how much I loved the alen­con lace and how beau­ti­ful the leo­tards turned out. In fact, so did oth­ers because short­ly after post­ing a pho­to of the alen­con leo­tard online, I sold out the rest of the lace!

In the process of design­ing the flower girl dress­es, the bride want­ed to incor­po­rate some of the alen­con lace into a gar­ment for her­self. Due to dis­tance and the cost of ship­ping mock-ups, we decid­ed that a loose fit­ting sim­ple v‑neck silk top would be the best gar­ment to make.

The top doesn’t have darts, but she may find a seam­stress there to dart the top for her. Since the silk charmeuse was very unfor­giv­ing when pinned or stitched, I was afraid to dart the top with­out fit­ting the top on her first and mak­ing a mis­take on the size and place­ment of the darts.

I used lace bind­ing to fin­ish the hem and sleeves. The lace bind­ing added a nice detail to the blouse, but it made the sleeves hang odd­ly and move stiffly. Ulti­mate­ly, I decid­ed to remove the lace bind­ing in the sleeves and fin­ish them by hand.

After mak­ing this blouse and spend­ing lots of time hand stitch­ing the lace applique, I was remind­ed of how much I love hand stitch­ing and cou­ture sewing!!