We did a thing

Hi Imgur. I'm a single father (not me in the picture) to a 7 yrs old girl. She loves to draw, especially princesses and fashion designs. One day she came to me and said that she really REALLY wanted this Rapunzel dress from the Disney Store. Well I'm financially very poor, so I had to explain to her that we couldn't afford to spend like 100 € on a dress. Of course she was sad, but she is also clever so it didn't took her long to figure out an alternative. "Dad I know what to do -I will practice a lot, and then, when I've become real good, I will draw the dress of my dreams, and then God will help me make it." I have to say I admire her faith. At that time I knew two things: 1. I am not God and 2. I don't know how to sew, but she was so convinced that it was going to happen, that I told her i would do the sewing if she did the drawing.

After a lot of sketches she ended up with this: -A Princess dress connoisseur will get it immediately, but for the rest of us- Sliced puff sleeves like on Snow White's dress, drawstring closure on the front like on Rapunzel's dress and (thank you Google-no-help-translate) those bows and curtains on the skirt like you see on Cinderella's dress. In aprox. 50 shades of pink and purple.

I know how to thread a needle, I've sewn a pillow to the doll house once, I mean what could go wrong?

So we bought some fabric and a couple of 2. hand scarfs and then i slowly realized that sewing is nothing like drawing at all. You need a pattern you know

Thank you McCall's...

27 pcs. Can't be that hard, can it?

sewing hieroglyphs

First take

Second take

Third take

And little by little (I re-did the front part 5 times)

It started to look quite allright...

-but then

Puff sleeves. Sliced puff sleeves. Couldn't find any patterns via google so I experimented

a lot

Until I found this solution on a website about German Renaissance clothing

Baste, sew, gather. Learning a lot of new expressions...

...And a lot about different fabrics. This is a very smooth nylon fabric with metal threads. It looks beautiful but it's very hard to work with. When the needle hits the metal threads they curl up, and it doesn't make nice curves

But by use of force -and some golden string...

it will bend to your will

Almost there

Diamonds, Gold and Super Glue

Ok those sleeves was a journey...

I was in a bit of a hurry at this stage, and i don't have a smartphone so there is only a few pictures of the rest of the process

And finally, after more than 200 (metric) hours:

This is the first time she tried it on. I asked her why she looked so serious and wasn't smiling. "Dad you know I like to be a princess, but this is a queen's dress, so now I act like the queen"

Tl;dr Couldn't afford dress from Disney Store. Made one ourselves