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Custom Wedding Dress & Kimono Upcycled Clothes | オーダーメイドウェディングドレス&着物ドレス

/ Archives for Chie

Chie

Mommy’s Diary: Mother & Daughter Style At Wedding

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mother daughter style by vivatveritas630Left: Lace wedding dress, Right: Made to order (contact vivatveritasshop@gmail.com)

Hello! Today, I wanted to show the dresses I made for a lovely lady from Sweden. She is getting married in February, and her little daughter is going to be her flower girl. According to her request, I made a matching dress for her daughter. The sleeves, fabric and the neckline are all mini-version of her mother’s wedding dress! I thought the idea of matching dresses was so special.

little flower girls dress by vivat veritas 630 little flower girls dress2 by vivat veritas 630

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More Technical Difficulties and New Sewing Machine

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floral back cut out dress

{Floral back cut out dress – will be available in different sizes on an online shop based in Australia! More details will be coming soon}

After my sewing machine stopped stitching properly, my laptop broke too. It turned off all of a sudden and never turned back on. I was so sad. Luckily, I had saved all the pictures and documents to my external hard drive just a week before the laptop died! So all the pictures of baby Kiko were safe, which was my biggest concern. It is the one downside of saving everything electronically. I rarely print out pictures, so if the computer or hard drive breaks, they are all gone.

Since I spend many hours on the computer everyday for work, I immediately went to store to get a new laptop. Since I’m cheap, I bought Acer laptop which was only about 400 bucks. After using the new laptop for just a few hours, I quickly realized that it was not a very well-built computer. The touch pad wasn’t functioning like it should at all, and it did not even come with Window’s OS. I didn’t realize that when I bought it. After a few days with the Acer, I had to return it. I paid a little more to get a new Toshiba Dynabook. It is so much better! I love it. The battery lasts long (4 hours) and it is much lighter than my old laptop. One negative thing is that I no longer have Photoshop. I want to buy it but it is so expensive.. Instead, I downloaded GIMP. Does anyone use this program? I’m still learning how to use it. It is similar to Photoshop though.

Also, I ordered my new sewing machine! After hours of reading online reviews, I finally decided on Juki DDL-9000SS (link to the PDF catalog. I was debating between 9000 and 5570 until the very end, but I went for 9000, one of the newest models from Juki. There was a big price difference, but my pc incident made me reconsider buying things just because they are a little cheaper. DDL-9000 has a servo motor, which is supposed to be much quieter than the old clutch motor. It also has an automatic thread cutter, three interchangeable sewing feet (instead of changing it with screw everytime) and crazy speed! It sews 5,000 stitches per minute!

I am supposed to receive it next weekend, and I can’t wait to try my hands on this new machine. It sucked to have my home sewing machine broken, but the bright side is that I got to try the new, industrial one, which I would never had if it were up to me since I’m cheap.

UPDATE: Thanks to Sarah, I was able to download Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 for free from Adobe website! Here is the link. Thank you so much Sarah!

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Sketch Everyday

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fashion sketch1 by vivat veritas

What is your New Year’s resolution for 2013? Mine is to practice sketching everyday. I wanted to make a goal that I can work toward everyday. After working on the dancers’ costumes last year, I saw my desperate need for better sketching. When talking with the dancer it became increasing difficult  to finalize the design, mostly because the lack of my drawing/sketching skills. I took art in high school and I liked it very much but once I went into the “real world” with jobs and what not I just didn’t have time to sit down and practice drawing.

As a starter, I decided to imitate the fashion drawing from the book, Dress Patterns by Adele P. Margolis. It was a gift from Andy’s grandmother last Christmas. It is an awesome book by the way, if you want to learn about pattern drafting and manipulation. The book includes a lot of illustrations, and I was attracted by the vintage feel of the drawings. So I’m spending 5-10 minutes everyday replicating drawings  from the book. Hopefully over time, I will be able to draw on my own.

So here are my sketches from last week…

fashion sketch by vivatveritas2fashion sketch3 by vivat veritasfashion sketch4 by vivat veritas After a week of sketching, I definitely feel more comfortable than before. Sketching the fingers I found the most difficult. Also the face, with a tiny little bit of difference, a woman’s face can look really scary!!

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