Six Six Sick: The Dark Knight: DIY Crusader Dress

Six Six Sick Dress and Jeffrey Campbell chain heels.

For the Spellbound party we did for Violet Hour on Friday, Christina and I wanted to make something extra special. We thought our outfits should convey the dark and Gothic inspired tone of the night, but wanted to avoid being too overtly campy or literal about the theme. Christina thought it would be cool to translate an old 66S medieval knight-inspired outfit, which had been made out of sheer mesh with a sequined cross on top, into a nicer, finished dress. While I hand stitched the sequined crosses from giant gunmetal paillettes, Christina constructed a flowing, drapey dress from sheer black chiffon, which she finished at the edges with twill tape. The instructions for making the dress are a bit too complicated to explain (sorry), but making the sequined cross applique isn't that difficult, and only took me about 2 hours per cross.

We started by cutting out the crosses from interfacing, making them about 2 1/2 inches wide. I slowly zigzagged the sequins up, eyeballing the distance between each row and column of sequins to be 3/4 inch apart. I think we ended up using about 450 paillettes per cross. When we were finished, we whip-stitched the top portion of the cross to the bodice of the dress, making sure that the bottom of the horizontal bar of the cross lay flush against the seam of the empire-waist of the dress. We let the bottom part of the vertical bar of the cross hang loose over the flowy lower portion of the dress, so it would move more naturally. We were really happy with the results, and I'll probably try and think of more things to embellish with plenty of sequins now that I'm starting to get into the rhythm of it.

Sorry for the absolutely atrocious camera phone pictures, my real camera is still completely broken, and I need to go out and buy a new one! In the meantime, my weirdly distorted iPhone photos will have to do.