Sunday, November 21, 2010

Warning: Major Nerdiness Inside - Petal Pattern for Dress

There will be 503 petals on my dress.  The first version of this had 1600, but that was too many.  :-)  500 might still be too many, I'll let it steep for a few days. In the first image, you can see where the petals will go.  They will start at the top bustle point and flare out to the side seams, with the most concentrated petals below the bottom bustle point.




Okay, so for the front, which is about 54 inches from side seam to side seam, I divided into 1-inch squares, 3 inches up from the bottom.  So, I then made a map of how likely I wanted there to be a petal.  Here is a map:

 
I've flipped it upside-down for you so that the bottom edge of the dress is at the bottom (and I've done this with all the images).  So then I used Random.Org to generate a bunch of random numbers, did a "if random number is less than likelihood number, then put a petal, otherwise not" function and got the following map of petals:
All right, then I measured the back of the dress.  It is 80" side seam to side seam at floor level, and 98 inches side seam to side seam at the hem.  The train is12 inches, and the top bustle point is 27 off the floor, so 39 inches from the hem.  The bottom bustle point is 27 inches from the hem,  or 15" from the floor.  So, here's the density map I came up with:

And here is the petal map:


I may tweak some more, but this is a good start!


3 comments:

Lee said...

That is indeed some serious nerdiness! But I bet those petals are going to be stunning.

Unknown said...

Good lord what a lot of work! I would just eye -ball it!

IowaHoodlum said...

Hi Candice!

I will probably end up eyeballing to some extent....I failed to remember that if I really wanted to use the pattern I generated I would need some way to transfer it to my dress. No way I'm going to mark up that organza, though! So I'll just use my pattern as inspiration/rough pattern. I can't resist using the random number generator.

Hope you had a good weekend!