Hi guys!

I haven’t seen you for a short while, as I have been extremely busy, however, lets put excuses behind us & get straight to it. When this beauty approached me & asked for a feathered dress, I thought no big deal. Feathers can come individually or as a trim. For me, personally I decided I would purchase a trim, make a shell for her dress, and sew it directly on top of that.

First, I had to outsource the fabric. I found this ostrich feather trim on Etsy for $42 dollars for 10 yards, which was an amazing price considering other places typically charge around $10/yard. I bought a total of 3 packages, or 30 yards in total. The trim is made by placing a single ostrich feather on a sticky tack seam binding and sewn closed. The trim can be found in all different colors & feathers. Make sure if you go to buy some that you are purchasing the right feathers. I have definitely bought wrong feathers in the past & they hurt to touch. Ostrich feathers are very fluffy & soft to the touch.

Second, I waited until the trim came in so I could find a relatively same colored fabric for the shell, or inside of dress. The dress was top lined & I completed the entire dress, as if it was going to be worn alone. *Pause* I realize when you do projects that you’ve never done before you constantly find yourself learning all sorts of lessons. I have decided to share those with you, so that I can prevent you from running into those same issues. *Resume* I pinned all of the feathers in rows across the dress, meeting at the side seams, but never overlapping. I made sure that each row of feathers carefully laid over the next so that it didn’t show any of the binding. I decided I wanted to pin everything first to make ensure that I had enough of the trim. Keeping in mind that the trim had sticky tack between the binding it was very hard to get the pins through the binding let alone into the dress. This was VERY time consuming. Even though this was very time consuming, I feel as if this step was very needed, because you could’ve ran into issues of not having enough materials.

Hours later… I was finally done! YIPPEE! The hardest part was done, or at least I thought it was. I thought sewing this trim down would be a breeze, considering the fact that all I have to do is just sew it in a straight line. Boy, was I ever wrong. When I went to sew the trim on I found out how hard it was to sew and hold each row of feathers back as I went along. This ALSO made the process super long. The feathers would constantly fall over and I would have to hold them all back up to make sure that I didn’t sew over them, but eventually the poof of feathers seemed so big that it was all just falling together.

As I realized the end was coming I started to get excited! I looked inside the dress, and saw that the dress was now probably a size smaller, due to me constantly sewing the rows on top of it. I just PRAYED that this dress fit this girl, because I had no leftover fabric, nor trim to waste. It was a tad bit tight in her bust area, however, it worked. I made a belt tie for her to accentuate the waist. After the entire process of making the dress was done, I realized that there was glue all over my pins & sewing machine needle, luckily for me they were not my good ones. I just threw them all out, however, they probably could’ve been saved with Goo Gone.

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Lastly, I learned a lot of things that I would do differently next time! Also, I may make a skirt coming up soon… for the holidays! 🙂

Blessings.