One Word Photo Challenge: The Dress

Good morning from a sunny Hastings day.

No, this is not the dress that has done the rounds in cyberspace.  For the record if you looked at the dress from the top down, it was white and gold.  If you looked at it straight on it was blue and gold and if you looked at it from the bottom up it was blue and black.  That is what I found when I looked at it on my laptop.

Anyway onto this challenge hosted by Jennifer.

Here is the finished beaded dress.  No, actually my fingers survived pretty much intact.  There are about 20,000 beads on it and I can safely say I touched every single one of them.  I did a post about the fashion industry a few weeks ago and ranting about the working conditions of the Russian emigres who worked up in the attics of Paris

https://decocraftsdigicrafts.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/travel-theme-the-fashion-industry/

So, how many hours did I work on it? you ask.  About 300 all up.  Give or take 10 hours or more.  So if I calculate that at minimal wage it cost me about $4500 just in the hours.  Then there was the fabric, which wasn’t too expensive and of course the beads.  I did go through several needles as well as about 300 metres of thread.  What really was the hardest to cope with was the eyestrain.  In the end I really struggled to thread the needle.  Severe double vision – which needle is the real one to thread?  I ended up buying a really good quality thread which was a bit stiffer and using lip gloss.  Why lip gloss? It made the thread glide more easily through the eye. I am already planning my next one, but this time I will leave a lot more time to do it.  I am going to cut up my wedding gown – loads of fabric with the skirt.

Here is a close up of the beaded fringe.

So now I have a healthy respect for those poor workers back then and of course now.  I bet the workers who hand bead the gowns for the big design houses today wouldn’t get that amount of money for their work.

The original image is a combination of several programmes.  My mother had taken that photo of me but she didn’t know how to use the zoom so the background was very cluttered.  So I used Photoshop to do the PNG image.  Not very good, as I am not so good at using the mouse with the lasso.  Then I used a scrapbooking programme for the actual image – Serif CraftArtist.  And then off to Photoscape for the text before Lightroom for the watermark.  I am still a work in progress with Photoshop.  I was used to my big Mac screen for it and was able to see it more clearly, so the laptop is harder for me to see. Especially after all the beading.

The teal colour is in the beads and the car.

One Word Photo Challenge: Teal

https://geophiliac.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/one-word-photo-challenge-teal/

https://nowathome.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/one-word-photo-challenge-teal/

One Word Photo Challenge: Teal

Thanks for visiting.