My wife started working with Barbara before my wife's wedding dress was being created, since Barbara was supposed to be helping design outfits for women doing a charity show benefiting GENAustin (Girls Empowerment Network). Barbara not only didn't fulfill her promise for the women working on the charity show, she just never showed up and never even returned the calls of the frantic women trying to figure out what they would do without outfits for the show. That was our first hint of what she was like.
My wife's mother, however, liked Barbara and decided to pay her to create a custom wedding dress for my wife. Things immediately started going wrong, as Barbara missed/cancelled fitting sessions and due dates. Even after she was paid 50% up front (although she claims she only requires a deposit of 25%), even after weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, she still hadn't even bought the fabric for the dress. My wife had to take a day off of work and spend the day driving around, and spend more than $100, to get the fabric herself. Yes, Barbara is a dress maker who either won't, or can't, actually purchase material to buy dresses.
Things just got worse from there. Every time my wife would come home from a fitting, she brought pictures of everything that had gone wrong with the dress. It was clear that Barbara simply wasn't concerned with creating it properly, as she repeatedly ignored the same exact requests multiple times (evidently she never wrote anything down). She was also given a photo of what the dress should look like, and either ignored it, forgot it, or was too incompetent enough to replicate it.
Suffice it to say, she didn't really get started on the dress until after its original due date, and didn't claim to have 'finished' the dress until just a few days before our wedding. Of course, by then it was awful and in a clearly unfinished state (parts of the dress weren't even totally sewn on and were left flapping, and even I could tell that the seams were uneven and ugly looking).
Just a few days before our wedding, my wife had to spend hundreds of dollars for an emergency repair, after spending another day off trying to find tailors/seamstresses who could both finish everything super-fast, and who thought they could fix the mess. Most of the professionals she spoke to, told her that Barbara had so seriously messed up the work, that they'd most likely have to start from scratch. Rather obviously, with just a couple days to go before our wedding, my wife didn't want to give Barbara yet another day to 'fix' the dress, my wife needed an actual professional to actually fix it.
Luckily my wife found some folks who could help her, since otherwise she wouldn't have had a wedding dress.
But Barbara's utterly horrible behavior didn't stop there. After my wife reviewed her services, Barbara attempted to 'defend' herself, by which I mean she started verbally attacking my wife. Barbara started by claiming that my wife had somehow altered the dress after picking it up (she didn't, and has the time/date stamped photos to prove it, along with multiple witnesses). In the process of 'defending' herself, Barbara was caught in a series of untrue-statements, and began deleting her comments, too (but not before people got screenshots). In trying to 'defend' herself, Barbara even admitted that she didn't even know if the dress was supposed to be a Supergirl or Wonder Woman dress (hint: if you have no idea what design you were supposed to be creating, you rather obviously don't know whether or not you created it). But that wasn't enough for our, ahem, professional seamstress. Nope. Then, she took to the internet to begin making comments about my wife's body, and claimed that the reason that she got a *custom* dress's fitting wrong, was because my wife's body wasn't perfectly symmetrical.
Let me just point that out again, if you actually want work that's custom and fit to your body, evidently Barbara might tell you that the reason her work doesn't live up to her agreement with you, is that you had to have the dress made custom.
If you want to give this woman a chance to ruin your wedding, stress you out, cost you money and time, and then insult your body on the internet? Then definitely give her your money. Otherwise, see a qualified professional. read more
