Woke up this morning and had the urge to make a dress, did a rough design and away I went.
Have already changed the design three times from what I originally thought.
The black balloons have a pinch twist in to try and keep the front of the dress flat.
The 2nd to 6th rows at the back from the waist down are approx a finger length longer to try and add shape for the curvacious bottom to fit comfortable into and the black 160 at the front I thought would be diamond shape but I like the look of running it into and out of the centre all the way down. It started without a twist in this bubble but at the centre where they meet it looked nice with and had to have a twist so have kept it in to see what the overall look will be when it's finished.
This has taken an hour at the moment to do, will try and post some more pictures after I do another hour of twisting.
I've been kneeling on the floor and turning the manaquein around but I'll have to put it on a table as my OLD knees hurt.

Another hour's worth of twisting  
The sketch is meant to be below the diamond on the tummy I was going to have two black vertical lines, that's why it looks like a pair of legs and then I thought just one vertical black line but when making it we went for plan C and the zig zag across the centre.

The straps over the shoulders will go around the arm and re-join the dress at the side of the bust and then I'm thinking of attaching another strap from the centre of the first strap to the centre of the back so pulling the straps inwards towards the centre so that they don't slip of the arms.

As the rows go down the dress we have made the bubbles slightly smaller to pull the dress/skirt in and from where we are now we will increase the bubble size drastically to try and get the dress/skirt to flare out for some shape

So another hour of twisting and the skirt part doesn't turn up how I would have liked, sometimes you can see it in your mind but can't physically do it, still maybe next time.
I think if I was to do the skirt part again I'd have the vertical white in black to give a nice contrast and the bottom of the skirt looks too bitty. The last four rows should have been all black instead of the one white odd row, still you live and learn. Life is a learning curve so they say.
The back of the skirt looks bland to me that is why the top half will have the black vertical line to add definition and some colour.

I've been asked to make a balloon dress for a landlady of a busy pub in Plymouth on July 5th. She's organsing a quiz/fun night in aid of our charity. But she's absolutley crazy, and is going to wear the dress and charge all the regualrs a 'pound a pop' and has already said she is prepared to go completely naked if enough balloons are popped. Should be a good laugh.

Maybe I'll post any pics on here . . . . well, in the private section actually.

The dress only took four hours and I think I got more plus points when making it. The bust area looks like it will work nicely, may need to add more bubbles to the backless part to stop the person falling out although I could use some uninflated balloons at the back in a lace style instead of the 1 finger bubbles, it may look nicer.
The shape was starting to come so will need to have more prominent differences in bubble size for the next one and the front of the dres is just too buisy. It would look good for the vertical black bubbles to go all the way down the dress from top to bottom and take off all that criss cross black 160's.
I also added some definition to the back of the dress that probably dosn't work with this style of dress but unless you try your not sure what will or won't work

The back of the dress would look nice with a bow at the lower back instead of the whatever the thing is that I put there and perhaps in a colour

have you got the booking for London Fashion Week next year?

I'd need to get a lot better really quickly if that came in

Graham,

Lovely dress, I bet you'll look lovely in it.    

very nice

very good - you'll certainly turn heads in that

Hi Graham,

Couple of suggestions about dress making. If your Mannequin is the break down model you may want to use the tightening clamps to your advantage.

On mine I can NOT tighten the body clamp, but there is a floating clamp that I can use to create a spinning arrangement on the pedestal and the body. Little difficult to describe in words.

Also by putting the dress on a small coffee table will save your knees too. I also use a short stool to work with.

Nice design BTW!!

When I set the manaqueinn up I undid what I thought was the spinning clamp and the whole of the botton section fell out, it was obviously the wrong button
I then found the right one to spin it around and ended up putting it on a full height table that was a good working height for me as I'm fairly tall.
Looking to make this again this week, similar design but hopefully from what I've learnt it will look far better.

When Graham was around the other week at mine and we were attemting to put the flowers inside the clear balloons he brought a dress up that was 7/10 days old and we popped all the horizontal bubbles. I was going to throw it away but thought it looked like a sheep, so here is what I made from the dress;