This bride came to us with a dress that had already been "altered". She showed us a picture of how she wanted her dress to look. This is the same picture that she had shown her previous big box seamstress. The dress she started with had a short, high waist with a small sash. She wanted an additional sash added to elongate the waist. She also wanted to add lace to the straps. She showed us her dress. It was a disaster.
Please excuse us for not giving credit for the first photo. I have no idea where it came from or who took it. If you know this info, please let me know, and I will credit accordingly.
The most obvious problem was that the added sash didn't match the dress in color or fabric. The second most obvious problem was that her dress didn't match the picture of what she wanted. The third problem was that someone with scissors had actually done violence to her dress. (I have other pictures with additional, terrible errors that I am withholding for brevity's sake.) You can also look at the middle picture and see how the top of the bodice near her underarms blooms out quickly, (particularly on the left side.) They altered the dress wrong for fit as well, and actually caused irreparable damage in the side seam. We patched it up as best we could and moved on. Also note: the mid-line of the sweetheart in the middle picture is off-center. We also had to fix that. ~sigh~. The sash part of her dress didn't end up being quite as long as we hoped it could be, but she wanted to use the original fabric so that it would match perfectly. That means we had to un-gather the ruched sash fabric and then sew it slightly less ruched so that it would be stretched as long as it could be.
I kid you not, we had to completely deconstruct this gown to fix it. It looked like an explosion chart on my cutting room floor. The problems pictured above are as follows:
A: When they added the not matching sash, they struck the zipper with the machine needle. Breaking the zipper and causing the seam to not hold.
B: They SNIPPED the front of her dress. The telltale "V" shaped cut does not lie. That is from a pair of scissors. Unfortunately, mistakes happen. But, this bride was not told about the snip.
C: Here is the dress with the length of the original waist/sash. This is just so you can see how much we elongated it.
D: My bride's dress deconstructed while I repair the gown.
E: The final result! Yay! This dress looks sooo much more like her original picture.