Sara (not so) Plain and Tall

Ok, maybe that title was from a Battle of the Books book back in the day. As mentioned, I helped Sara from my ward put sleeves on her dress for Senior Prom. It was a fun project and it was great practice. I imagine I'll be adding sleeves to a lot of dresses in the future.

First we picked out some silk and tulle to go with the dress. We only needed about a third yard of each fabric. After we made a rough pattern with some spare fabric, we cut our sleeves.


We tried a couple different hems and decided on a very tiny hem with the fabrics turned under. I don't have a serger so the edge on the underside isn't as finished as I'd like, but the zig zag stitch still does a decent job. We ruched the ends and pinned them to the dress. I hand sewed the sleeves to the dress so I didn't have to go through the sequined tulle layer (if it feels like I'm going into an inane amount of detail, it's because I want a record of this for later when I need to do this again). I was still sort of hating the results until I put the sequins on. Sara's dress came with extra sequins and we thought it'd look good to cover the seams and sprinkle the sleeves with a few sequins. We were right:

I'm pretty excited about how it come out. The pictures don't do it justice. The dress actually looks better with sleeves and I think it looks like the dress was meant to have those sleeves.

Yes we're posing awkwardly on purpose.

Doesn't Sara look AMAZING? So glamorous! That's her standing with her proud parents. My camera died before I could take a picture of her with her date, but he was so dashing in his tux and hand tied bow tie. They looked so old Hollywood. So glad I could help her look amazing and "classy modest", as we put it. :)

P.s. How lovely does Suzy's spray tan and Natasha's hairdo look?