Belle — Holy Hardcore Handmade

All that glitters is gold...glitter.

Warning, profanity-laced post ahead. Read at your own risk.

Fuck Belle and the horse she rode in on (named Philippe). Fuck her pretty yellow dress and fuck me for thinking, hey, this Glitterbug fabric with GLITTER on it is really cute and would be perfect! Fuck glitter.

Topping the list of fabrics I absolutely will never use again: anything with glitter. It looks like a glitter bomb went off in my sewing room. And on me. I’m googling around trying to figure out how to clean my sewing machines because there’s glitter everywhere. So if you see me and I have hints of glitter on me weeks from now, no, I did not take up a second job at the local gentleman’s club. I made a Beauty and the Beast dress. Oh, not one, but TWO of these fuckers. One for an American Girl doll, the other for my niece, and she better wear this thing every damn day to school. She better get married in this thing.

Ok. I’m calm. I just had to get that off my chest. This pattern is Simplicity 8407, part of the Disney Princess collection. Pretty sure Disney would not approve of the language used while creating these dresses.

I got to a point with this that I said, fuck it, I’m not doing the whole thing, there’s gonna be a yellow sparkly dress and it’s gonna be close enough. I couldn’t bring myself to add the neck drape, dress drape, and roses all over the damn thing.

You know what else? Fuck doll clothes! Teeny tiny little seams, fabric getting sucked down into the feed dogs of the machine…

I’m cool. I’m calm. WAIT, no I'm not. I started writing this post before I was finished. I took a break, grabbed some dinner, and ran to Joann's for more yellow satin because I was short for the lining. I came back to do the lining. I put the lining together, it was uneventful. I had already resigned myself to the glitter situation. Lining is easy. No problem.

Then I turned the child size dress right side out.

I had serged the bodice front, overskirt (tulle) and skirt (glitter hell fabric). The serger stitches caught a fold in the bodice right in the middle. FUCK!

Ok, no problem, gently pull the serger stitches out and release the fold, press it out, restitch it, no problem.

The serger knife tore a 2" hole.

Holy goddamn hell.

OH NO!

See that crease in the bodice? That's where I caught the bodice in the serger. See that wet stuff? That's fabric glue where the knife caught the fold and cut a 1.5" hole!

I slapped some fabric glue on it (not sure why, it felt right). I took another break to ponder how to fix this. I'm not doing it over. I was in the home stretch. All I had left to do was to close the lining. Not anymore!

I'm a problem solver. Obviously the front edge of the bodice where the serger hole is will not be able to be repaired and remain visible. Time for an embellishment. I am not failing this project!

Since I didn't do the drapey things on the dress and neck, I went back to the glitter fabric, because why not, it's a damn mess in here, might as well get some more glitter all over the place. I took a long 3" strip of the fabric and serged the edges to keep them clean. I placed it face down on the bodice, just about a half inch above the seam where the dress meets the bodice, and stitched it down. I then folded it over and hand stitched it all around, making a belt of sorts around the bodice. I Because there was a slight v-point at the center front of the bodice, I did make one little flower out of yellow satin to hide the crease I had to make at the point. Phew. Crisis averted.