Couture Embroidery

In the past two months, I've had two couture projects, going simultaneously.  I had started on the condom couture project for Project Inform's Evening of Hope fundraiser (more on that later) and had the muslin and most of the pattern finished before a new job came in that was supposed to take two weeks at most to complete but ended up taking more than three weeks to finish.  A designer hired me to do couture embroidery on lace for a mother of the bride dress she had designed.  The original plan had been to order the lace already embroidered, from a factory in France.  Unfortunately, by the time the lace was ordered, it was August when factories in France close for a month's vacation.  So the lace arrived locally, un-embellished.  This constituted a "fashion emergency" to get the lace embroidered in time for the wedding on October 22.  All I had were some photos of the original embroidered lace sample and the blank lace.  There were two garments to be embroidered, a corset and a lace bolero to wear over the corset.  Since the lace was very expensive and fragile, I stretched out tulle on my embroidery frames and then basted the lace on top of the tulle and embroidered through both layers.  Since the tulle was very lightweight, it's nearly invisible once the garment was constructed.

This is the lace bolero before I took it apart to embroider it.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of the garment once it was reconstructed after embroidery and my relationship with the designer has since deteriorated (more on that another day).

These are the two sleeves which wrap around and become the front of the bodice.

 

This is the embroidered corset basted together.

I think it turned out beautifully.  I'm just disappointed that I wont have pictures of the finished garments.  That's not unusual when you do this type of work and someone else is responsible for the construction.  It's also disappointing that I don't credit for all this work (over 150 hours!) because the designer told the client that she was having the embroidery work done in New York.  Apparently she thought the client would be more impressed with that.