TANYA: OK so here's the situation. Junior prom was Saturday, May 15, 1999. In February I went to the mall with my friends and the dress I wanted, the ONLY dress, the dress of my dreams, was $189 plus tax, and it was a floor-length navy satin thing with a square neck and these little straps. My mom said, and I quote, "I could make that." I said, and I quote, "Mom, NO." And then she made it. And it was better. And it cost $46.12. I have the receipts stapled to my closet door. So this page is partly to help other people and partly so I can never forget that my mother was right, which she would like in writing.

MOM: I have been sewing since 4-H in 1968 and I have made two wedding dresses, one of them my own, so a prom dress was not the great leap Tanya thought it was. What WAS a leap was doing it with a sixteen-year-old (she turned seventeen in April) who had never threaded a machine and had opinions about everything. She learned. I learned. We are still speaking. Here is how it went.

MOM: We went to the fabric store on a Saturday morning in late February and sat at the pattern table with the big catalog books for an hour and a half. Tanya wanted the mall dress. I wanted something she could actually get into and out of by herself. We found a formal-wear pattern from one of the big pattern companies with a fitted princess-seamed bodice, square neckline, spaghetti straps and a floor-length A-line skirt, with a center-back zipper. Pattern envelopes have several "views" (variations) on them, and one of the views was almost exactly the mall dress. The patterns were on sale, which they are about every other week if you watch the ads. $3.99.

Two things I insisted on. One: a princess seam (the seams that run from the shoulder or armhole down over the bust to the hem) instead of darts, because you can adjust a princess seam at every fitting and it fits better on a young figure. Two: nothing strapless. You cannot make a strapless bodice stay up on a first try, and I was not going to spend prom night wondering.

TANYA: I wanted strapless. I'm putting that on the record. Also the pattern envelope had a drawing of a lady with a 1987 haircut on it and I almost walked out. Mom said "you're buying the dress, not the hair." Fair.

TANYA: Here is the actual secret of the whole page. The nice satin on the bolt was $8.99 a yard and the pattern needed four and a half yards, so that's forty dollars right there, plus lining. But at the back of the store there is a table of "remnants," which is the ends of bolts, and they are half price or less, and you have to dig. My mom digs like a badger. On our THIRD trip there was a piece of midnight blue satin, kind of a heavy one (Mom says "bridal satin"), 4 5/8 yards, marked $2.99 a yard. It had a tiny crease-mark near one end that pressed right out. I actually screamed a little in the store.

MOM: For the record, remnants are a gamble. You need the whole amount the pattern envelope says for your size, plus a little, and you need to check it in daylight for flaws before you buy, because you can't go back for more of the same dye lot. We got lucky, but we also went three times. The lining was plain polyester from the regular bolt, $1.49 a yard, and the muslin for the trial version (see tips) was 99 cents a yard. Everything else was notions: two zippers (yes, two; keep reading), thread, hooks and eyes, boning for the bodice, a strip of interfacing, and horsehair braid for the hem, which is a stiff nylon mesh you sew into the hem of a formal skirt so it swings out instead of hanging like a curtain. It's what makes a homemade gown not look homemade.

MOM: Before a single inch of the satin was cut, I made the bodice up in muslin, the cheap cotton, and pinned it on her. That's the first fitting and it is the one that saves the dress. Patterns are drafted for a body nobody actually has. Tanya is long-waisted, so I added three-quarters of an inch to the bodice length, took in the side seams a hair at the ribs, and raised the neckline a half inch because her father was going to see this dress. I marked all the changes on the muslin, took it apart, and used the pieces as my new pattern. Then we cut the satin.

Second fitting, early April: the real bodice, seams basted (long loose stitches you can pull out), before the lining went in. Straps too long, took them up an inch. One princess seam wanted letting out an eighth of an inch on the left, because nobody is symmetrical. This is normal. Third fitting was supposed to be a formality, with the skirt attached, to mark the hem with her shoes on. It was not a formality. See below.

TANYA: Fittings mean standing on a kitchen chair in your bra with your mom sticking pins in you while she has more pins in her MOUTH and talks anyway. For like an hour. Three times. Also, tip: wear the actual shoes and the actual bra (mine was strapless) to every fitting, because the hem changed a whole inch when I switched from sneakers to the heels, and things sit different. Mom's words. Things sit different.

TANYA: It is Thursday, May 13. Two days. The dress is DONE except the hem. I am wearing it for the third fitting. Mom says "turn around" and zips me up and the zipper goes about halfway and STOPS, and she pulls, and it goes crunch, and I feel it go crunch, and I say "was that the zipper," and there is a silence, and she says "don't move."

The zipper had eaten the lining. Like, the lining had gotten caught in the teeth and then the pull, which is the little slider thing, had bent. So we are both standing in the kitchen and she is trying to get it to go DOWN so I can get OUT, and it won't go down either. I was in the dress for forty minutes. My brother came in for a sandwich and left.

MOM: I want to say in my defense that I had put the first zipper in correctly. What I had not done was tack the lining back far enough from the zipper teeth, so a fold of it got pulled in. Once the slider is bent there's no saving a zipper, so I got her out with a seam ripper (the second seam ripper of the project; the first one was lost in the couch), took the whole zipper out that night, went to the store when it opened Friday morning for a new one, and put it in Friday afternoon, this time with the lining hand-stitched a good quarter inch clear of the teeth. Then I hemmed it Friday night while she was at a friend's house so she'd stop hovering. It was done at 11:40 p.m. Prom was the next day at seven. That's not cutting it close for a sewing project. That's normal.

TANYA: The two times I cried were: (1) the zipper, and (2) when I saw it finished. She didn't cry either time. She said her eyes were tired. OK, Mom.

TANYA: Since we don't have a scanner yet (see below) I'll describe it. Midnight blue satin, really dark, almost black inside but blue in the light, kind of shiny but not cheap shiny. Square neck. Thin straps. Fitted all the way down to the hips and then the skirt goes out in an A, all the way to the floor, and because of the horsehair thing in the hem it swings when you walk. No beads, no sequins, no bows, nothing, which is what I wanted, because every other dress at prom had stuff glued on it. It looked like a dress from a movie. Three girls asked where I got it. I said "it's custom." Which is TRUE.

I wore it with silver sandals from the discount shoe place ($14.99, not counted in the dress) and my grandma's rhinestone earrings. My date wore a rented tux with a blue vest that his mom picked to match, which she did by calling MY mom and asking for a scrap of the fabric. The moms had a whole phone tree going that I did not know about.

MOM: The bodice is fully lined with boning in the princess seams so it stands up on its own and nothing shows through. The straps are self-fabric tubes. The zipper is a center-back invisible zipper, the second one, and it works perfectly, thank you. The hem is a narrow hem over horsehair braid. Every seam was pressed as I went. Total time, I'd estimate thirty-five hours over eleven weeks, about a third of them Tanya's, mostly on the skirt seams, which are long and straight and were her first machine sewing ever. She did a fine job. I told her at the time. She says I didn't.

MOM: Off the receipts on the closet door. Sales tax is included in these where we paid it.

TANYA: The mall dress was $189.00 plus tax. So we saved like $150 and I got a dress nobody else had. Mom says we did not "save" anything because we did not "have" $189 to begin with. This is a philosophy question.

1. Make the bodice in muslin first. Always. It costs three dollars and an evening and it is the difference between a dress that fits and a dress that "fits."
2. Press every seam as you sew it. Before you sew the next seam across it. Not at the end. Satin especially wants pressing with a press cloth and a fairly cool iron, and from the wrong side, or it will go shiny in the wrong places.
3. Buy the right needle. A fine, sharp needle, size 70 or so, brand new, for satin. A dull or heavy needle snags the satin and pulls threads and you will see every one of them under the gym lights.
4. Pin only in the seam allowance. Satin remembers every pin hole. Same with basting; keep it inside the seam line.
5. Use an invisible zipper and the special foot for it. The foot costs a few dollars and makes an invisible zipper truly invisible. And keep the lining a quarter inch clear of the teeth. I will not be explaining why again.
6. Let the skirt hang overnight before you hem it. Any skirt with bias in it (the A-line sides) will drop unevenly. Hang it up, then mark the hem the next day with the shoes on.
7. Horsehair braid in the hem. Sold by the yard with the notions. It's the difference between a gown and a nightgown.
8. Start in February. Not April. We started the last week of February and were hemming the night before. If you start in April you will be wearing something from the mall.
9. Let her sew. Even the long boring seams. Especially the long boring seams. It's her dress.

TANYA'S TIP: Don't eat anything red in a fitted satin dress. That's all. That's my tip.

PHOTOS COMING! My aunt is giving us her old scanner when she gets her new computer at Christmas, and then the prom pictures go up here, plus the "in progress" ones of me in the muslin looking like a sack of flour, which Mom says are the useful ones. Until then use your imagination, but imagine it looked really good, because it did.

Senior prom is May 2000. Mom has said the words "maybe strapless this time." I heard her. There are witnesses.