Making Wedding Dress Pt. 11 – Balloon Train

I’m continuing making the wedding dress series! One thing that my bride friend felt very strongly about is including this particular back bow, pictured below(image source unknown).  She called it “balloon train”, although it is not really a train in a traditional sense. When coming up with the dress design with her, I asked her to list the features that were most important to her. This bow was her number one priority. I did a bit of research on “balloon train” in Japanese, but nothing really came up, save this one image. It is such a small image I could not really see the exact construction details.

But from talking to my friend, I knew she wanted it to be kind of flowy, bowncy and light weight. We picked polyester organza as a fabric. Then I made three big bows in slightly different sizes, and placed the smallest bow on the top of bigger bows. In the middle bow, I inserted a white wire, so that it would have more 3D effect. I looking at the pictures of the “balloon train” it seemed like to be supported by something like a wire. This would give structure to the bow and keep it from looking too flat.

Under the three bows, I added two long strings of organza to imitate the balloon train. For those strings, I did not finish the hem and left the raw edges. I often stopped and looked at the dress from far to see the balance of the bow. I don’t have many pictures of this process since I was concentrating on making this thing!

Read my progress on sewing wedding dress! :

Part 1 – Fabric shopping
Part 2 – Muslin
Part 3 – Another Muslin
Part 4 – Cutting Fashion Fabric
Part 5 – Sewing the Bust Part
Part 6 – Ruching
Part 7 – Skirt Part
Part 8 – Install a Zipper & Bones
Part 9 – Skirt Lining, Another Attempt to Install Zipper and More Supplies 
Part 10 – Hemming and Attaching Pearls and Rhinestones