Zelda Progress: Dress & Painting

I didn´t take any pictures of the making of the dress because it was such a huried process, and had a lot of trial-and error in it. I am never again using a sleeveless dress as a base pattern for a dress with sleeves--it´s too complicated to fit the sleeves in the end, especitty when like me you´re not used to attaching sleeves. *sigh*. Also, I somehow made the dress too big for me, so despite my wish to make it a one-pice, seamless dresss (well, minus the side seams), I had to add darts at the front and back. I also cut the top too muchh: the boat neck ended up being too wide to be held up by my shoulders alone, and showed off my bra straps...luckily, Zelda ties her capelet under her armpits and around her back, so the bra straps and neck weren´t a problem at all. It still bothers me a bit though, so  maybe I´ll remake it sometime.

The finished (sewing-wise) dress, ready for me to paint the patterns on. I drew the designs on first in my trusty silver chalk pencil (which is conveniently erasable with a regular eraser).

Closeup of the rectangular design in silver.
 

After that, I traced over the outline in  gold fabric paint.

I started filling it in to make the solid design I needed.... And this was the end result:

Closeup of the neck area with the embedded jewel section..... I really like that wierd sort of squarish curl at the top. It was fun to paint.

The sleeves also had a square "U" design on them.  It was hard to make a pattern for it; I ended up grabbing a measuring tape and just going with that.

There we go. both sides painted, all designs complete. I averaged around two hours for each side (painting the rectangle design) and about forty minutes per side for the other designs (boat neck, sleeves and front pendant section). Took longer than I thought it would. I had to paint it twice, so that the gold color was "solid" enough, and there was no magenta from the dress bleeding through. All in all, I used about a whole small bottle of paint for this whole project. Whew. 

I haven´t taken any pictures of the capelet...it´s a semicircle, roughtly 70cm in diameter, with two ribbons sewn to the ends. It perfectly reaches my elbows, like it should. I made it using some leftover raw silk from my Mulan outfit and another leftover piece of white cloth that I had lying around. I needed to use two because both of them were too thin to use by themselves.