Dragon dress: Embellishment

Please zoom in, I didn't use 200+ hours on this
for people to look at a tiny photo.

After the official deadline for this project, I continued applying beads and such to the dress whenever I had a free moment. The last semester of school I wasn't very social. No life, only sewing.

I developed a burning hatred for pearls.
So pretty. But so fed up with them.

WIP

I started out sewing the bead appliques I made and the dragonscale smocking onto the dress, before applying beads all around them, working them into the fabric and such. Looking back, I think the beads I sewed directly onto the dress look more organic than the ones I sewed onto organza first, so there's something to remember if I ever decide to do anything like this again.

WIP: Started on the embroidery.

On the dresses worn by Daenerys Targaryen in GoT, the dragonscale smocking is worked into the fabric of the dress with an embroidery stitch called lock stitch. And since I was unwilling to shell out a whole lot of money for the pamphlet in which it is described, I looked to the interwebz to figure out how to do it. No such luck. In spite of having teachers who have sewn as long as I have lived, in addition to being blessed with a classmate who is a walking embroidery lexicon - we found nothing.

So I put off doing any embroidery for a long itme (in the meantime I just sewed more and more beads onto the dress). Until one day I realised I would just have to wing it and make it work with a buttonhole stitch or something - which I didn't want to do, I wanted to do it properly. So I googled it one final time, in despair I might add, and GUESS WHAT I FOUND. Not perfect, but a tutorial I could work from.

WIP: Back

It was finished in time, a week before our fashion show and exhibition. After graduation I wore it to Desucon. I don't know if you can tell, but while fire cannot kill a dragon, the sun scorched my collarbones quite a lot that day.

The design.

The result.

It's finished - for now. I think I'll redo the bodice seams, after working on it and worn it, there's some puckering. I also have a ton of beads left, so I could embellish the hips as well like planned on the design, but for the moment I don't want to see this thing again. So for now, it'll hang in my closet, hopefully reminding me to never do something like this ever again.