A Modest Princess

Having asked a date to Winterball, Devyn needed a dress and sent me the following text:

Resale shops are great places to get formal gowns on a small budget. You just need time to find the right one, and with a little creativity make any alterations needed – which I offered to help with. Devyn took me up on that offer the very next day. She texted me a picture of a dress she was trying on. She didn’t have time to resale shop, so she bought a new one and asked me to help add straps/sleeves to make it modest.

The turquoise dress she chose was high enough to be modest; it was just missing sleeves. The dress came with a matching piece of tulle to be used as an accessory – and a perfect way to create matching color sleeves/straps. However if we just used the tulle, the straps/sleeves would be sheer- and not very modest. We discussed options for lining the tulle and then headed over to the fabric store to see if we could find matching color satin.

We found some satin fabric very close to the color of the dress. We also picked up some similar color tulle so that we could make a set of practice sleeves/straps before using the matching color tulle. And of course we bought matching color thread.

We then found some examples online, some of our favorites were;

Kaela Wheeler Designs has instructions and suggested width for sleeves – link to Kaela Wheeler Designs

and The ModestProm Blog has several examples – link to ModestProm Blog

We decided that the easiest would be to make straps wide enough to cover her shoulders like a cap sleeve in satin with an overlay of the matching tulle. We measured how long and how wide the strap/sleeves would need to be to cover her shoulders and decided to make the sleeves 6 inches wide and 21 inches long.

Turns out that satin and tulle are quite tricky to sew and I was glad to be first making a practice set. I cut a wide strip, and then sewed in the edges as I sewed on the tulle.

I then ran a gathering stitch to gather the bottoms of the straps creating a more elegant strap/sleeve. These sample straps were then sewn into the dress.

Devyn came over to try the dress on and was happy with the result and so I went ahead and made another set of straps/sleeves, this time using the piece of tulle that had come with the dress. It was tricky to get the edge seam to lay as flat as I would have liked because the satin and tulle were so slippery. But once they were gathered and sewn into the dress they looked great.

Looking at the dress on the hanger, the straps don’t look quite wide enough to be cap sleeves. However, as they were custom made to Devyn – once the dress was her they gave her enough coverage and she went to Winter Ball a Modest Princess!