Karen Millen

One of my favourite stores at the moment is Karen Millen.

It's one of my favourites for a few reasons, firstly, the clothes there are really well made with good fabrics. For instance, everything is lined. You might think I sound really old fashioned for admiring this, but I've found as many companies try to cut costs, the lining of dresses & tops is one of the first things to go.
The second reason I like them is the patterns, everything is cut well, (for my shape anyway :P), there are no odd bumps or lumps. If I could make patterns like that, I would be a very happy camper... (or seamstress...)
The final & perhaps one of the greatest reasons why I like Karen Millen is they sell whole outfits. You can buy a nice dress & jacket there, but then you can also pick up matching shoes, bags & belts. The accessories aren't just in the same colour, they are well matched, often covered in the same fabric, picking up the details of the jewels or patterns used in the dresses.

Needless to say, when I was in a frantic rush to find a dress, because I hadn't had a chance to make one & was flying out to Canberra at lunchtime to go to a wedding, this store was my first & only choice.

In the pictures I'm wearing dress & belt from Karen Millen, shoes from Wittner*, bag from Target ($8 - one of the best bargains I've had all year).

*OMG the most painful shoes I have ever worn! They are not shaped very well at all & all the pressure is concentrated at the back of the balls of your feet (right near the arch). Also the toe points up a bit so you don't really have any contact on the ground with your toes. It's my own fault really, when I bought them I was in a super-hurry & wanted black patent pumps NOW, so I didn't spend the time I should of testing the comfort factor.

Bridesmaids

Now that I have my wedding dress somewhat organised it's time to move onto the more difficult terrain of dressing two of my closest friends who have kindly agreed to be my bridesmaids.

Bridesmaids dresses are so difficult. I don't like the idea of dressing two girls in the exact same outfit when their sense of style & personalities are so very different. I'm a big fan of different dresses in the same fabric or matching fabrics. At the same time I want them to both look like part of the bridal party & not just another guest. Both of my girlfriends are in their mid-20s so I also wanted to avoid putting them in a dress that made them look like they were off to a high school formal. Add to all of that a fear of imposing upon your friends or worse still putting them in a dress that they consider equivalent to a peach taffeta nightmare, & you can see why this was stressing me out more than my own dress.

Thank-fully I have been very lucky. My girlfriends have so far been remarkably patient & open-minded, the best kind of bridesmaids!). The three of us have very different tastes in fashion so it has made shopping for fabrics & selecting dress styles quite challenging, but I think we have finally reached agreement on the design of the dress.

The girls will have different dresses with a similar style. The setting for our wedding is an old mansion & gardens so the general style is still quite traditional, so we selected a couple of vintage patterns for the dresses.

Without further ado, here are the designs:


Patterns: Butterick B4918 & Vogue V2962

We haven't really decided what the decorations will be. Possibly fabric flowers, beads, crystals, who knows, but we'll find something that we all like.

Tomorrow I'll be making toiles for the girls, I'll post some more pictures when the girls try them on. Once the toiles have been adjusted I'll have to transfer adjustments back to the patterns & move on to the official dresses.

My new favourite shoes!

It was my engagement party on the weekend & because I like to wear new shoes on special occasions, I ordered a pair of shoes I'd been lusting after for quite some time now... a pair of Marc Jacobs misplaced heels.

I have to say they were worth every single penny! Yes, they felt a little weird at first but after 5 mins they were SUPER easy to walk in. Plus they looked fantastic. I love how abstract they are, I love how plain & simple the shoe is but just by moving the heel, they suddenly look like they are from another dimension.

I was also amazed at how many people, who normally never notice or comment on fashion*, were commenting on them. I think more photos were taken of my shoes than of my fiance & I, which felt kind of weird given it was our engagement party. The boys from my work are still talking about them - I might wear them again to the Christmas party just to freak them out some more!

I love these shoes, I'm so happy I spent the money to buy them, I don't care that they were expensive because they are works of art. Everyone I spoke to loved them because they'd never seen anything like it before. I think that's what makes these shoes so wonderful, in a world filled with knock-offs & 'inspired-by's, these shoes are completely fresh & original.

For me this is one of the things that links engineering & fashion for me. I love moments in both fields when somebody does something different. They turn the world on it's head, do something completely original and yet once revealed it seems so simple & ingenious, we wonder how it was that we never even thought of it.

* Most of my friends are engineers, for many of them fashion is weird thing that only has relevance in a distant world, many light years away.

The Dress

Over the last couple of weekends I've spent hours & hours (roughly 5 hours counts as hours & hours right?) in bridal stores around Melbourne looking for 'The Dress'. I love shopping, I love putting on beautiful things & parading around. I thought this would be fun, this would be a great laugh. I'd try on a few silly yuk dresses to make my girlfriends roll around on the floor laughing, before emerging in 'The Dress'. I was wrong.

After my hours & hours (5 or maybe 6) spread over two weekends I was exhausted. I was sick of being belittled & treated like a child by overbearing sales assistants. I didn't want to see another puffy drop-waisted dress that used copious amounts of beading & lace to cover up bad seam lines. I was tired of being lectured about how close my wedding is & how hard it will be for them to make a dress in 4 months. If that was the case why did you even give me an appointment?! I was completely deflated.

BUT... I refused to have a complete nervous breakdown*. After the last shop, my mother, the queen of tact & timing, suggested we take a break & go look at fabrics for the bridesmaids, (I'm making their dresses). I agreed & we went to one of my favourite fabric stores in the city. Eventually we started looking through the patterns and there it was. Superb! A pattern that was very nearly the exact dress I wanted... From there things just kept rolling, it was one stroke of luck following another, before I knew it I had found another couple of patterns which I could use for modify the first pattern to get it to the exact dress I wanted! Brilliant! I knew it was meant to be when I went to pay & it was only $20 because they were all on sale! Then my darling Mother reminded me that my Dad is going to China in a week & could pick up the silk for me over there on the cheap. Suddenly I was on top of the world. I was enjoying myself again.

To celebrate I took my wonderful Mother to Bistro Vue, (my favourite french bistro in Melbourne), where we sipped Veuve, enjoyed our lunches & and got excited about my wedding all over again.

* That evening I was explaining the days trials & tribulations to a friend who in turn told me about a girl she'd been maid of honor for. My poor friend had been dragged around to dress shops every single weekend for two months, before the girl decided that the first dress she'd tried on was in fact the one for her. I'm so glad I didn't break down, my friend is an absolute angel, I don't know how she did it.

EXCITEMENT!!!

So I've been quite busy lately & have neglected the blog somewhat, but I have a good excuse. I got engaged a month ago!

The last few weeks have been drifted by in a haze of champagne & parties & we haven't even had the engagement party! Somehow though we've made an enormous number of decisions in just a couple of weeks. We've even picked a venue & booked it. The best bit is there's less than 6 months until the wedding!

Now I'm super excited because with all the big decisions out of the way, this weekend will be filled with oooos & ahhhhs as I hit the shops with my mum & bridesmaids to find a dress. I've spent the better part of the last week trawling the internet & flicking through magazines looking for dresses I would wear. Here are some dresses I've fallen in love with;

Oscar de la Renta

Elie Saab

I promised myself...

...that I wouldn't buy anymore fabric until I'd used what I have.

I have wardrobe with quite a large amount of fabric hanging up. I have a nasty habit of buying more fabric than I will need if I go to the fabric store, or worse still picking up a couple of metres of that cute fabric that I'm sure I'll find something to make with when I get home. So I made myself a promise that I would find fun ways to use the fabric I had before buying a whole heap more.

On the weekend though I was quite innocently browsing through the Chapel St bazaar with G. & stumbled across a vintage fabric store. I resisted all the beautiful vintage 60s & 70s haberdashery fabrics that I've been dying to make a cute little pair of shorts out of and (thanks to the extraordinary price tags) my willpower held true when I saw the gorgeous 30s prints that were just dying to be turned into knee-length gathered wrap skirts a la Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. However I found when I found 2m of this vintage 50s wool for $35 I couldn't hold out any longer.

I haven't decided what I'll do with it yet. That's for later...

Purple Haze

I've made a couple of very simple dresses recently. This one was actually made with some cheap fabric that I had lying around as a practice for a pattern I downloaded. I had originally planned to make this from a nice soft lightweight wool, but wanted to check the pattern first. Funnily enough I ended up liking this one, but sometimes the full block colour is a bit much for me. I'm still getting used to wearing dresses that aren't all black or patterned. Apologies for the grainy quality of some of the pictures, I changed some settings on my camera & am trying to work out how to get back to what it was. :S





What: I'm wearing: Self-made purple dress, Zoe Wittner lace-up boots.
Pattern used: Downloaded from Burda Style - Anda #7969
Cost: Probably about $10-15. I think the fabric was about $4/m because I bought 4m to make various things. I think I used about 1.5m. The pattern cost me $3.50. I also used some black thread & a bit of interfacing.
What I like: The little bits of detailing I decided to add around all the seams. Granted this was largely because I was too lazy to drive to Spotlight & buy thread in a matching colour, but I actually think it worked quite well, particularly with the matching tie belt.
What I don't like: The stiffness of the fabric. I think is pattern is a little better suited to softer fabrics. A lightweight wool, or stretch jersey.
What next: I'm going to make the same dress in a black lightweight wool. I also saw a similar dress in Decjuba recently but the waist of the dress was defined by a braid that brought the skirt & top section together. It was a really interesting design feature & I've been thinking about how I could incorporate something like this into a top or dress myself.