Steampunk Prom Dress

This is the first sewing project I have actually documented and attempted to share, so bear with me on the somewhat incongruous photos! Anyway, after going through several thrift stores looking for a potential prom dress, I ran across this puffy green dress from the 1980s for six dollars at my local Goodwill. Despite the ghastly bows and almost Gone With the Wind look, I felt it did have potential as a steampunk prom dress, an idea that captured my desire for both individuality and my overall love of the Victorian era re-imagined. Here are some "before" pictures that I took.

The first things to go were obviously the bows! I personally love safety pins because my skills at gathering large bunches of fabric by sewing are not that great, so I started off by hiking up the skirt in a few places with some to get some initial ideas. I decided to put one big hike up to give it very steampunk look, with some other smaller gatherings to add more shape and body to the skirt. I had to cut the netting under the dress so it wouldn't show in the new raised part of the skirt.

I wanted to really change the overall look of the dress and make it look more Victorian, so I decided to add a lace overlay to the bodice of the dress. I found a really neat fabric remnant at Jo-Ann's a few months ago, so I went back and bought another yard of it so I would have enough to make actual pattern pieces. Because the bodice is so form-fitting, I used some of my big white rolls of paper to roughly sketch the shape of each panel and then cut them out of the lace. I was pretty worried about sewing lace, but I soon found that it actually wasn't very different or more difficult than sewing other fabrics. They were just rough outlines, so I did have to do some readjusting to make the lace seams line up with the seams on the dress better. I didn't get them to match exactly, but they are close enough that they'll hold up under costuming/prom/my standards. I had got this far, but hadn't really thought through how to actually attach it to the dress itself. At first I wasn't sure how well a raw sewn edge of lace would look on the bodice, so I found some gold trim lying around and decided to sandwhich the lace between the trim and the dress. I picked a pretty narrow trim, but the stitching on top was pretty indiscernible. After sewing it, I just trimmed the excess as close as I could to the underside of the trim, and it became nearly invisible. I initially thought it looked kinds flashy, but the contrast has grown on me and I think it does accentuate the steampunk look. This picture is a bit blurry, but it still shows the overall idea.

I didn't really want to put the trim up near my armpits or on the back, so I tested some swatches of lace on the green, and with black thread it was nearly impossible to see the stitching. I just tried my best to stitch well and I think it turned out fine. On the back, I had to be very careful when stitching around the zipper, and I left just a little extra lace to cover the piece of fabric covering the zipper.

With that done, I moved on to the strange, floppy off-the-shoulder straps. I tried just moving the straps up to my shoulders, but the elastic was too tight and it was itchy and uncomfortable. I cut the elastic out and then chopped off a good portion of the floppy part in the back. I sewed a hem on the bottom of the remaining part of the strap and then bunched it under the back of the dress to create a crumpled strap. After sewing the straps back to the dress, I hand-stitched the front of the straps to give it a crinkly look. I also needed to make a panel to fit inside the skirt where it was hiked up. I used some black satin material with a two-tiered lace overlay to make a cute insert that went with the rest of the dress.

With this, I had essentially finished the sewing aspects of the dress. After folding everything back down, I got some of my steampunk emblems, my pocket watch, and some antique-looking keys and attached them to the skirt with some miscellaneous chains. I like using the various elements to cover where I had placed the safety pins. I still feel that I need a pin or broach to go on the very center top of the bodice, but I haven't decided what yet. I do have a gold hummingbird pin that I'm considering putting on.

So here is the finished dress! With this I complete my first blog! If anyone has any questions, feel free to comment. I plan for my next post to be the accessories for this outfit, which I am still working on putting together.