The Purple Prom Dress

Happy (late) summer! We had a jam-packed summer break, which I will recount later, but this week, the kids are settled into school (and uni), so I'm catching up on posts and such. Do people still write blogs these days? Or read them? Or is it all just tiktoks and instagram? I feel very behind the times, plodding away here on ikatbag. Maybe I'll try instagram sometime. Apparently I have an account, but I keep forgetting and people have to remind me. It seems rather out of character for me to just post pictures (let alone just one!) and not also write a novella accompanying them. But I get it - times have changed, and maybe people now only have the attention span of a flea, so perhaps byte-sized social media is the way to go.

See - this is what I mean: that first paragraph of nonsense prolog. I don't know if instagram and I can even be friends.

But let's talk about this purple prom dress already.

In May, Jenna went to prom. And needed a dress. The only things certain at the time were that it had to be purple and textured. There was the usual feeble concession of If We Can't Buy It I'll Sew It, which both Jenna and I knew really meant We Won't Be Able To Find What We Want In Stores So Let's Start Drafting Yesterday. I knew it would be work - it usually is, to take an idea in one's head and bring it to life - but experience has shown me that in each instance of handmaking an important garment, nobody regretted having chosen that over ready-to-wear.  And the reasons range from practical (it's a more efficient process than trying to buy - and return!- RTW), to emotional (there are limited school formals left to sew dresses for, sniff). 

Then I caught myself for that "but", as if I had to justify my choice. Let's take a quick tangent here to explain.

Some of you know that I've been in therapy and initially it was because Dad died unexpectedly some years ago and threw me for a loop. Since then it's evolved into an exploration of loss and what it means to be the sole immigrant from my family in this country, plus all the ways I'm becoming whole in the aftermath of both. One of the most useful concepts I've learned, not only through in-person therapy but also from books and podcasts containing the wisdom of others who've had these experiences before me, is the idea of "And also." 

Particularly for a person like myself who's been trained to think analytically and methodically, the idea of "And" initially was weird. We science-y sorts prefer "But". "But" brings with it demarcation and the clarity of contrast, which is important in precision: we define things as much by what they are as what they are not. To become whole after loss, though, involves integration and creation, a building up of parts that have meaning on their own but which are also so much stronger fitting together in congruent ways. 

Hence "And also".

For instance, I've learned that I can be Asian and also embrace Western American values, that I have robust family and friend support networks in Singapore and also in Minnesota, that I can have lost a parent and also have an emotionally denser and authentically meaningful relationship with the remaining parent, that my teenagers can be independent and also excited about close ties to their family.

And as those teenagers grow out of the house, hurtle toward graduation and becoming newer and fuller people through their college years, I can be sad about how fast those the child years have disappeared and also be 100% unafraid to experience all the manic milestones of both senior year HS and freshman college year: auditions, concerts, football games, swim meets, homecoming, prom, apartment move-ins, apartment move-outs, summer jobs, clothes acquiring and clothes donating. And also be excited about their future decisions and adventures. And also be apprehensive. And also ignorant. Bewildered. Confident. Thankful. Proud.  

Because we never know what the future will bring - and how it might even surprise us by its providence. 

Like that one day this past summer when Emily wanted to sew shorts. And we went shopping and drafted (traced from an old pair she loved, actually), and she made herself these: 

Did I see that coming during her senior year as she was packing up her stuff in her car and driving away to her new apartment? I did not. Could I have visualized her bringing that same stuff back to this house less than a year later, then spending the next three months just hanging out here with the cats, completing once more our table of five, working two (very fun and very in-character) jobs, as well as several craft fairs I got to help with, as if that move to college never happened, except it did, because she was now so much more poised and serene, and also deeper and brighter and braver? I couldn't have - my Graduation-Day brain, wallowing in the emotions of loss, had ultralow expectations; it certainly did not have the bandwidth to imagine that this change could be good, let alone this good. 

Fast forward to a year later, to Jenna and her dress. And to me weighing the pros and cons of Sewing vs Buying. I finally decided there didn't need to be a But, wherein I rationalized Why Homemade Was Ultimately Worth It. Instead, I thought, "Yes, it would be lunacy. And also I want to do it." No justification needed.

And that's where we are today - taking you through the process of this dress coming together. Because if you thought Emily's green prom dress was a lot of work (and I did, too, at the time), that definition was about to be completely revised with Jenna's purple one. 

First, as I'd mentioned earlier, was simply the framework that it had to be purple and textured. So we went shopping for fabric, and found this sheer lace with floral motifs along one edge. Right away, looking at it, we knew it would be the border detail for the skirt hem.

Then we found lavender satin for the underlay. The sheer layer on top provided the texture we were looking for.

Second came the sketch. This was the prototype. Jenna quickly vetoed the double straps and we simplified the design to single cross-straps.

Then I drafted the block and pattern. Each piece of the initial outer dress was two-layered: the satin with the sheer lace. The skirt had to be cut out first, to place and reserve the embroidered border design. The remaining clear sheer section was then used for the bodice.

Here are those two layers basted together. My mother had been right about hand-basting all this while: that it is indeed superior to pins, particularly in garment making. I remember teen LiEr hissing and grumbling each time I was made to hand-baste, begging instead to be allowed to just use pins, or press lines with the iron, or anything else, really, as a faster alternative. Hilariously and ironically, these days, I find myself choosing to hand-baste at the slightest opportunity. Oh, the wisdom of hindsight - and of those who knew better. 

Here's the bodice, with its still-visible hand-basted CF seam.

Up to this point, I did not consider this Work - the design was pretty straightforward, the pieces came together quickly and the fabric wasn't especially fiddly to work with. It took maybe a day, day and a half. After this, though, came the circus. Here is a shot of the plain bodice - the plan was to cut out lace motifs and stitch them onto the bodice to create texture that would complement the edge design on the skirt hem. I reminded myself that as I'd done something similar for Emily's green prom dress, this would be more of the same. I forgot, however, that with the green prom dress, the bodice was covered by whole lace fabric, with just additional motifs sewn onto the skirt and back. This purple dress was quite the opposite in that I had to create that whole-lace look myself.

Here is a shot of that bodice in progress. Each bit of lace had to be handstitched onto the main dress (and hand-basted before that!)

It was, as my kids say, sooooo extra. And naturally it ended up being a last-minute thing, although not from procrastinating; it simply just took this long. I sewed all day the day before prom, then on the morning of, I sat at my sewing table and stitched 6 hours non-stop. 

When Jenna's friends came over in their dresses to do their hair and makeup together, I was still sewing. 

And when we got to the park for the photoshoot, I was still pulling basting stitches out of the bodice. While the cameras were rolling, yes.

Which explains why there are many shots of the dress on Fleur, my mannequin, and not so many on Jenna, because there was no time to do a posed photoshoot of her in it before she threw it on and raced to the park to take photos with her friends. It was only days after prom that I put the dress on Fleur and got most of these pictures.

Here's the back.

And here is the full frontal shot

the bodice,

and that skirt hem.

That crazy embroidery wraps around the side

and to the back.

This is the full back view.

A couple of the very few full front solo shots of Jenna and one side-ish one.

One of her corsage, which Emily made

and one of her with Kate, who came to the photoshoot for "moral support and comedic relief", in her words.

More posts coming up soon. One is a project Emily has been working on, and another is an update on stuffed toys and such. And also I have thoughts to share on sending a first kid off to uni. See you again soon!