Art Deco Style Swimsuit

This swimsuit has been a long post in waiting.  I made it way back last summer, and I just now got around photographing it.  I took the swimsuit with me to California, and decided to do a last minute photo shoot the day that I had to leave.  I was really glad that I made time for it, because there aren't too many sweet looking pools like this where I live - at least none with palm trees. 

I wanted to recreate this amazing Abaete swimsuit that I saw while reading Vogue once.  I made a few slight adjustments, but they're pretty small, and still hold pretty true to the design that I saw. 

As for the construction, this is probably the most in-depth garment that I've ever made.  So much time went into hand sewing, and making sure that all of the design details, and the fit was correct.  For the fabric, I used a stretch linen (for those of you seamstresses who are wondering, the linen has held up great in water!  There's no shrinking at all.), and cream jersey lining on the inside.  I drafted the pattern using my own measurements, except for the bottom portion.  I cut up an old pair of well fitted underwear to use as my base pattern for the bottoms.   

There's boning in the bodice, and all of the white lines are bias tape that was top stitched onto outside of the suit. The bias tape was all hand pressed and made from an old, twill, satin skirt that I had.  The halter straps are made from that same fabric as well.

The lining took the longest to work on.  I only had scraps of jersey from other projects that I had worked on.  At the time I didn't feel like going to buy more, so I just used what I had, and pieced the lining together from scraps.  Although looking back I wish that I would have waited to buy more fabric, because so much time went into hand sewing the inside!  Because I only had small pieces of jersey, all of the seams had to be hand sewn down using a whip stitch to keep from bunching.  I also hand sewed ribbon, and bias tape to cover some of the seams as well (as you can see from the zipper and waist area).  Overall around 40 hours went into sewing this swimsuit. 

All photos taken by myself

I have one more shoot from California coming up and then I'm back to posting Indiana photos.  I'm working on a fun short video right now which I'm really excited about and can't wait to share.  

More to come later this week, and I hope you're all enjoying your summer!