I've been gone for a month but now I'm back! I had important exams in June, finished school forever and tomorrow, I go on holiday for 2 weeks. Hopefully, I'll have some scheduled posts ready by the time I leave to get me back in to the habit of blogging more frequently.

So to begin with, here's my Handmade Bucket List No. 5: a white shirt.

These shirts definitely aren't the normal white shirt. I seem to be more attracted to loose fitting shirts with unusual collars. At least I can buy the pattern for the last shirt!

Images from 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Here is my finished prom dress:

The dress was completed a good 24 hours before rather than last minute like the last prom I went to and throughout the night there were no issues with it falling down. I wore the dress with black heels (which I managed to wear all night), vintage black stud earrings and a black clutch bag.

I really enjoyed the whole thing and normally I only like the getting ready part. The marquee was beautifully decorated with tea lights in jam jars and cream balloons. Nice and simple. Music was generally good apart from the awful DJ playing the macarena but by that point, everyone had drunk a little too much to care. Including the teachers.

I feel a little sad looking back on the photographs because there won't be another event where all my friends will be together before everyone goes their separate ways in September.

The reason I haven't posted anything in the last week or so is due to a looming deadline. The project is for Textiles and the theme is Culture and Tradition. I still need to work on the sketchbook, but this week was the "exam" where we had 15 hours to make our final outcome.

I chose to make a skirt which I drafted the pattern for myself and I've actually quite pleased with it. I did make a toile which does fit me but I have no idea if the actual skirt does. I'm not really bothered if it does or not since that's just another stress I chose to ignore. And bear in mind that this skirt is not something that I would wear outside of school and there was only enough time to take poor quality photographs with my iPod.

These photographs are only snippets of what I've recently been getting up to because if you can't tell from the photos, I've been experimenting with making simple underwear and I don't feel comfortable showing any more than this. 

I used an old t-shirt, stretch lace, elastic and 2 buttons. To get the pattern, I chose an old pair that fits me comfortably and just traced around it. I specifically chose a pair that used stretch lace around the leg holes because I already had a few metres of this lying around and didn't fancy buying anything new for this quick project. All in all, I probably spent about an hour on this, which included making the pattern so I think I'll be making more of these in the future.

If you want to try this yourself, I recommend that when your tracing your pattern, that you stretch your underwear as much as possible since my first attempt went wrong and were a wee bit too small.

This post is just to show more photographs of my Pre-Raphaelite inspired dress. I'm sorry for the image overload. They're not even good quality photographs since didn't use a nice camera and the dress wouldn't fit over my dress form due a short zip (my fault) so I have no photographs of what it looks like on. Perhaps when I get it back, I'll be able to post better photographs.

Some of the things I didn't mention in my other post were that I lined the bodice with a Liberty of London cotton lawn which happens to be designed by Pre-Raphaelite member, William Morris. I also had to add extra support to the shoulder strap to hold all the draping down or it would do its own thing. The skirt is made up of a base skirt which is just a simple A-Line skirt with a few darts in the back. I then draped chiffon over the sides to create a petal/ tulip look. My photographs make this look confusing so new photographs really would help. Oh well... I'm just glad to have handed this project in already.

Pre-Raphaelite inspired dress

This dress was made as part of a school project in which I looked at art-influenced fashion. I decided to make my own art-influenced fashion so chose the Pre-Raphaelites and after a little research this is my outcome. I used a light-weight cotton for the base of the dress which I drafted myself. I then put this on my mannequin and draped chiffon over the top of it. Next, I spent hours hand sewing it down and then finished it off as I would with any other strapless, boned dress. Fingers crossed I get a good grade.

navy coat

This coat was made over two years ago. It took forever to finish due to procrastination but I finally finished it to debut on my 16th birthday. It was well worth the wait. I've been wearing it ever since and it's looking a little worse for wear after 2 years. I used McCalls 5531 as the pattern and the fabric I used was a navy wool. It's lined with a plaid-like polyester and I found these cute buttons with anchors on them to use as the fastening.