My husband and I recently got married. To get married, I needed a wedding dress.
Since dresses are extremely expensive, and I prefer the personal touch of things, so I decided to sew my own.
I realized that my sewing skills are very limited, and a wedding dress is rather complicated to create. In order to actually make the dress, I needed help. Luckily, a good friend of mine is a bit more experienced with tailoring and was happy to help, so most of the credit for the dress goes to her.
All I really did was take my mother’s wedding dress, cut it into pieces, draw a sketch of what I wanted and feel rather useless while watching my friend bring the sketch to life.
For comparison, this was my mother’s wedding dress:
So after taking her dress apart, I was left with a lot of fabric and a rather funny looking top.
The dress was made out of three different kinds of fabric, a very light one for the underskirt, a thick one for the top skirt and lots and lots of tulle. For my dress I only needed the thin fabric for the skirt and an underskirt and the thick fabric for the top half. At least that was what I thought at the beginning.
After completely disintegrating the Skirt of my mother’s dress and sorting the fabric, my friend and I got to work.
The top part, that had a corsage theme, went along smoothly. We cut the fabric, sewed all the pieces together, used cable ties to give it some structure and rivets to create lacing in the back.
After that, all that was left to do was to create the skirt. We realized the skirt had to have a second layer, since the fabric was pretty see through, and I didn’t want to walk down the aisle half naked.
After finishing the skirts, which we created following a simple circle skirt pattern for the underskirt and some freestyle for the upper one, we had to put the two pieces together.
While sewing them together shouldn’t have been the problem, it created more friction than it was supposed to. I had to open up the seam a few times, before I was happy with the gathering.
In the end, it all worked out better than I or my friend had expected. I was very happy with my summer wedding dress.
Finished dress:
A few days before the wedding, I had to sew a cape if I didn’t want to freeze to death. The summer dress was going to be a fast ticket to hypothermia.
The weather report, and the actual weather on the day, were anything but a classic summer day. We had 7°C, lots of wind and even more rain.
So to sew the cape, I used all the thick fabric I had left. I created a hood and a simple cape out of a rectangular piece of fabric. In theory, it is quite easy to create a cape. It still took me five tries to properly put the hood and the cape together.
With a finished dress and an improvised cape, I had finally created my wedding look just a few days before the wedding.
Sadly, you can’t see the cape very well, but it’s the only picture I have wearing it:
To complete the story:
It was freezing and my husband and I had to change into something warm after the ceremony and photos.
So I only wore my dress, that took me and my friend approximately a week to create, for about two hours. The rest of the evening I spent in sweatpants and a neon pink winter jacket.