Making a Life-Sized Holiday Barbie 2021 Dress Part 2: Adding Details to the Bodice

My journey in making my own Holiday Barbie 2021 dress continues.  Last week, I painted the white corset I had chosen for the bodice silver.  This week, I began adding embellishments.  It turns out, sewing on a ton of rhinestones and faux pearl strings is pretty time consuming, so I'll have to update you on the rest of the embellishing in next week's post, but we're making progress.

Materials:

*Silver corset (if you need to paint a corset, see this post)

*The largest rhinestones you can find

*Faux pearl garland

*All-purpose adhesive

*Sewing needle

*White or silver thread

Directions:

Note: The largest rhinestones I was able to find were about 30 mm high.  Thus, I was not able to replicate the pattern on Holiday Barbie's dress.  I used her pattern for some inspiration and then filled in the remaining space with designs of my own.

*Secure a small group of rhinestones to the corset using all-purpose adhesive.  Let dry.

*Sew the rhinestones into place to ensure that they stay on the bodice.  The all-purpose adhesive I use is reasonably sturdy, but for something like a clothing item which you'll be pulling on and off, I definitely recommend securing them with some thread to make sure they stay in place.

*Repeat the gluing and sewing with another small cluster of rhinestones.

*Keep repeating until the central panel is done.

*Next, take your pearl ribbon and glue it onto the corset.  Let dry.

*Sew the ribbon down for extra stability.  I basically sewed every third or fourth string section between pearls.

*The pearl ribbon maps out where the rest of the rhinestones will go.  Arrange your rhinestones, glue down, and sew them in place.

And that's what I've done so far, although the bodice is still far from complete.  Tune in next week to see the next phase of decorating the bodice.

Making a Life-Sized Holiday Barbie 2021 Dress Part 1: Painting the Bodice

This holiday season, I have a rather large project I'd like to try my hand at.  Instead of doing one grand reveal, I wanted to try breaking it up into smaller pieces and posting about my progress as I go.  This could go really well or the project could go disastrously and then I've documented my failure for you all, but either way, it will be a learning experience.  Also, this way I hopefully won't put it all off until the last minute.  If I need weekly content, I'll presumably have to work on it a little here and there so that I can share something with you.

As a kid, I loved Barbie.  I remember seeing Holiday Barbie in stores in her beautiful dresses and wanting a doll of my own, but I never actually had one.  I also loved the holiday Barbie ornaments, but again, didn't have one.  Well, I ended up stumbling across images of Holiday Barbie 2021, and I was in awe of her dress.  I'm like, I'm a grown adult, I can buy myself a Holiday Barbie AND Holiday Barbie ornament and fulfill a childhood dream.  But then I thought to myself that it would be even cooler to become Holiday Barbie.

I scoured the internet for a dress like Holiday Barbie's, but to no avail.  And then I thought, maybe I could make myself a Holiday Barbie dress.  I spent hours combing the internet for the perfect supplies.  I debated and debated whether it was actually a good idea to take on this project, and eventually I hit submit.  And here we are.

Now I know what you're probably not thinking, but absolutely should be: But Amber, you hate sewing.  And I kind of do.  I don't make a point of this, and I love what sewing can do for me, but the actual sewing process I do not really enjoy.  So why make myself a dress?  Well, once I have an idea in my head, sometimes it's very hard to nix it, and I just could not get over the idea of how cool it would be to have Holiday Barbie's glamorous dress.  This may prove to be a spectacularly bad idea.  Or a great idea.  I'm leaning toward bad idea, based on preliminary results, but only time will tell.

Holiday Barbie's dress has a beautiful silver bodice.  To minimize the amount of sewing I would have to do, I picked up a corset which I will be modifying to make the bodice.  I could not find an affordable silver corset with either a back or side closure, so I ended up buying a white one that I could paint silver.  Today we'll be focusing on that part of the process.

Materials:

*White corset

*Silver paint

*Textile medium

*Paintbrush

Directions:

*Cover your workstation in newspaper or some other protective layer to keep it from getting covered in paint.

*Lay the corset down on the newspaper.

*Mix together the paint and textile medium in the proportions given on the textile medium bottle.  Mine was two parts paint to one part textile medium.  This will essentially turn your acrylic paint into fabric paint.  You're supposed to iron it to set the paint, but I don't think this corset is ironable, so I'll just use the corset very carefully.  Once the rhinestones are on, it will be a challenge to wash anyway.

*Once the front is dry and has been set, paint the back.

 *Optional: Paint the inside of the corset.  I painted the inside of the straps, since I was worried about that portion being visible.

Now we have a silver corset.  It's kind of pretty, but it's not very Holiday Barbie.  Next I'll be adding some rhinestones in hopes that this will make it a little more like Barbie's dress.

The big issue I'm having at the moment is that the corset arrived folded in half, and there is a significant crease in that location.  I should have tried tackling that before painting, but I didn't, and so now I'm trying to press it out using a heavy textbook.  But I have a feeling it's there to stay.  So not super optimistic, but we'll see how that goes.