Modified Style, Adventures in Dress Making

During the last two weeks I spent all of my free time working out the final details of a dress I designed for Modified Style.  For those who are not familiar with this Seattle/Portland based non-profit recycled dress making fashion show competition, Modified Style is a challenge to make a dress out of a mysterious bag of recycled fabric scraps  in order to eventually raise money for charity.  Check out this post in the Slog.  It is a wonderful organization and I am lucky to have been able to participate in the first one in 2008 and again this past weekend.  All of the dresses are unique and amazing; they are creative visions released for good fun.

Ki modeling the dress I designed for Seattle Modified Style 2008

Ki and I - Seattle Modified Style 2008

I have learned so much from designing and crafting these dresses together; mainly that I am capable of designing and creating a unique dress!  Also, on the other hand, I know very little about sewing and tailoring in general.  It was very exciting to learn how to make a gathered skirt and how to use my sewing machine to make button holes.  I meant to document my dress making process as it happened over the past 2 months and of course I did not.  Now I will recapture as much of the process as I can, mainly with pictures.

To begin, here are the scraps I started with for Modified Style 2010:

And some of my first ideas.

Brainstorming with fabric

One last thing, a little side note, somehow I won best dress overall in this last competition!  I am a terrible winner- it's always hard for me to believe that I deserve to win because I believe that when everyone works so hard at creating something unique that everyone is a winner.  However, I worked my ass off and I'm really excited to get the wellness massage I won:)

Another side note, my friend Annika and I designed and modeled our dresses for each other.  I got to model her whimsical fairyland dress featuring a hoop skirt made out of a bike tire.  She won most creative dress.  She worked her ass off too!