Blue Bead Dress

Lil Blue Boo & Dharma Trading have teamed up to host a design challenge!! The idea is to use a Lil Blue Boo pattern and make it unique by fabric dyeing, fabric painting, stenciling, fabric transfers, screen printing, or other embellishments. I kept thinking and thinking about what I should submit for this contest.. finally I thought about what my daughter likes... umbrellas and rain of course! Then I remembered a poem I had written in high school called 'The Tree' which is also about rain. So this dress was inspired by that.

For her dress I used the hoodie pattern (minus the hoodie- I added a collar instead) and used fabric painting, fabric transfers, applique and beads!


A Little Photo Shoot...

A. is in love with this dress!!



The Details...

The Front:

The girl (which represents the girl in the poem.. who I made sorta to look like my daughter) is painted on with black fabric paint.

The tree is appliqued on with black knit fabric.

The rain is painted on with silver glitter fabric paint. (a little hard to see in the photos)


The leaves are also appliqued on by sewing down the middle of each leaf. I just used up some scraps I had left over from previous projects :). And I added fray away to the edges of the leaves to keep them from fraying.

So the tree comes around under her left armpit.. and around to her back...where you find the backside of the girl, and also the poem.

The poem is added to the dress using a fabric transfer. I added a little bit of silver glitter fabric paint around the edge of the poem.


The skirt is two layers, turquoise on the bottom and blue on top. The fabrics were snipped apart into strips, and embellished with beads, then the strips were knotted at the ends. I picked out bead colours that matched the leaves on the tree. I remember I used to have a skirt like this when I was younger and I loved it, A. loves her equally as much, if not more! ! :)


And I paired the dress with some black leggings (also a Lil Blue Boo pattern) :)


This is definitely something new for me, and I'm so glad I tried it out, I learned a lot in the process :).. I can't wait to see who the judges choose as top 10 this week, and I can't wait to see all the submissions, it's going to be great!