🌷 Garden Lace 🌷: Spring's Best New Dresses

I couldn't be more excited about our newly released 🌷Garden Lace 🌷collection for mommas and littles! 


Like every EleStory collection, I usually start by stumbling upon an amazing fabric swatch like this one, and then I literally sketch and dream up the design for months until something feels right. I knew this fabric is pretty popular amongst several other brands, so instead of ditching this beautiful fabric and the possibilities altogether, I embraced the challenge of creating something completely different from anything I had seen before.
I am so happy with how this one turned out. It was worth all the challenges and frustrations we encountered in creating the pattern and sewing many iterations of this design in sample making, to finally bringing my vision to life. I hope you like this collection as much as we do.

One of the challenges I came across was something seemingly very simple, but in reality took a team of us to figure out: I wanted to make the dress elasticized in the back for easy changing, but also wanted the front empire waistline to be top stitched with the velvet ribbon I had found on our annual sourcing trip to Asia. I couldn't let go of the idea of doing a raw edge treatment of the skirt peeking above the velvet ribbon, so that took a bit of figuring out in patterning and sewing, how the front and the back would connect. Plus there are three layers: the Embroidered tulle, an extra tulle layer to soften the overall pattern of the embroidery, and an extra soft cotton sateen that would become the lining of the dress. So the construction techniques of piecing three layers together was a bit of a challenge, but we did it!

My little girl was a willing model for mama's Garden Lace photo shoot. :)

I'm thankful that she still loves to match me even though she's 7. I hope she never changes. I'm just enjoying this as much as I can. <3

For the women's design, after many other attempts at designing a different silhouette, I finally decided to go back to the tried-and-true, super flattering style of our Enchanted Lace dress. I personally don't prefer to wear sleeveless dresses, and I am also a lover of maxi length dresses and skirts, so I find this new refresh of the Enchanted Lace dress just so dreamy.

What I love about the embroidery design featured on the women's Garden Lace dress is the way the flowers become denser and fuller towards the bottom of the dress. And the rayon slip is the most comfortable slip you will ever try on -- you can totally wear it to bed, it's that soft!

We did our photoshoot with Kandace from Kandace Gonzales Photography, and my friend Carolina and her daughter Lyanna were there too for a little fun playdate with June! Lyanna is 18m but wearing our sample dress that ended up being labeled as our size 2/3T, which is why it looks so much longer on her. But she is still as darling as ever! We girls had fun!

Thanks for all your love and support for EleStory! We are so grateful to be able to continue to design and make pieces here in San Francisco that you cherish with your families. 

xx,
Judy 

Founder/designer of EleStory