If you asked me what aspect of my art I love the most, collaborating with fellow creatives would be pretty high on that list. So when my friend Laurence of Only Human Photography approached me a few months ago with a concept he wanted to collaborate on, it was an easy “YES!” for me.

Of course, then life got in the way and now it’s been several MONTHS since he asked! After weeks of not being able to work on the collaboration because I was moving and then more weeks of traveling for work, and then MORE WEEKS of actually working on the costume but it taking forever to finish, I was FINALLY ready to shoot the photos for this collaboration yesterday!

And since I just wrapped up shooting, I thought you guys might like to see the costume I made!

 

 

Now, let me just preface this costume I’m about to share with you by saying the following: ask me to collaborate on something and I’m already interested. Tell me your vision for this collaboration entails a pure white dress that billows in the wind like no other:

That idea is sold faster than a cute sweater on the 75% off rack.

While I already have a bunch of white dresses (you may recall one in particular being featured heavily in my Ireland pictures), I wanted to do something special for this collaboration. So I decided to make a new dress!

 

 

Now, I’m pretty sure you are well-versed with my method by now. Curtains were purchased at Salvation Army (Oh, how I miss you so, my dear, dear Savers). Old sheets were cut and pinned and recut and repinned to make my pattern, and then the curtains were transformed.

I will admit, while the dress itself was pretty easy to make, those sleeves…. I just can’t even fully articulate how frustrated those sleeves made me. I think I spent a week on the dress… and two weeks on JUST THE SLEEVES! And frustratingly, they’re not even exactly how I pictured them. But that’s life sometimes. And I still think they will look great in the photos, so sometimes you have to pick your battles (preferably not after you’ve already lost the first 40 skirmishes, but you live and you learn sometimes).

 

 

I also ended up having to sew lace down the front (not pictured) because somehow along the way my seam got wonky. This is one of those battles I chose not to fight, because while I have forgotten most everything I learned during my many college economics classes, I do still remember the cost-benefit analysis. And so I decided taking two minutes to sew a strip of lace over the wonky seam was far better than spending hours ripping out the bodice and redoing it. Again: you live and you learn sometimes!

Now as for what this dress actually looks like on me (because yes, I’ll be modeling in this collaboration), well… you’ll just have to wait and see the final product!