Work in Progress - Lady Gaga Hello Kitty Dress

Last year I had a little fun and replicated the Bjork swan dress. It was a lot of fun and I got a great response from it (plus, it sold). So I was looking for another challenge dress to make... and someone brought the Hello Kitty Lady Gaga dress to my attention. This was around October of last year.

So, I've been slowly working up to it. The first challenge was finding all the Hello Kittys - remember 100% recycled, so they had to be from thrift stores, garage sales, etc. Luckily I have retired parents that love to bargain hunt. They have collected nearly 40 plush Hello Kitty. We have yet to see if it's enough.

I have many more challenges ahead of me as I have now completed the base dress and one row of elastic. I thought I'd share my progress here.

This is the base dress. It has two hoops (they are removable so that the dress can be washed and shipped easily). My daughter loves the dress this way... and if I didn't have a huge pile of plush, I might have just stopped here. But I love a challenge and I want to see if I can replicate this dress.

I stitched on one layer of elastic. I originally designed this so that the kitties could be removed and played with. Of course, I'm not sure this is going to be a practical dress that anyone could ever wear.

This dress, with just one layer of plush, is very heavy. I've reinforced many of the seams up top anticipating extra weight... however, I didn't anticipate it being as heavy as it is already. So, I'll be doing some more reinforcement as I add more layers of elastic. We still have at least 3 - 4 more layers. Yikes! Thankfully they get smaller as we go up. I have a feeling this is going to be quite the display piece at my shows.