Grad Ball Anna Dress

I'm back! I promise I haven't died or been abducted by aliens or anything! If you've seen my Instagram recently you'll know that I suddenly realised that I had nothing fancy to wear to Gregor's Grad Ball. So I hatched a clever and cunning plan, I would make a lovely By Hand London Anna dress in black triple crepe. So off I went with a spring in my step to get the train to Birmingham to go to the Fancy Silk Store only to be stopped by terrible train services (I'm looking at you London Midland!) So long story short, I got to the shop and had a look around. I found some nice black triple crepe, but I wanted something a bit more special to go with it and found some beauuutiful beaded net.

It's so beautiful!  Like a clear starry night 😍😍 I got it all cut out that evening and started sewing it the next day in between making wedding invitations with the other half. By this point I only had 2 days to get it finished and I was working on both days so cue some frantic evening sewing! I did french seams all over to keep it nice and neat, but bloody hell is it time consuming! I only bought 1.5m of the beaded fabric so I decided to do a small train instead of having the full skirt covered and I'm actually glad I did it that way because I felt super fancy!

The finished dress is actually quite heavy because it took 3.5m of triple crepe to make the main dress, but once it's on you don't notice the weight. I wont be posting a picture of it on me because the only picture I have is one where I have a big cardigan over it because it was freezing and I had a big fat moon face 😂😂😂 so here it is on Busty LaRoux!

I will note that I wasn't tripping over it, I just don't have the mannequin set up to my height. I really love the dress but its not really something I could wear on a regular basis, but hopefully I'll get more wear out of it since it was also surprisingly comfy for being fancy evening wear :)


Difficulty level - 3/5 because of the hand stitching of the beaded train

Cost - triple crepe 3.5m x 9.99 = £34.97
         - beaded net 1.5m x 15.99 = £23.99
         - 22" concealed zip = £4

Total - £62.96 A bit more than I would normally spend, but if I had bought something like this in a shop, it would have likely cost a lot more!