WEDDING DRESS

 

Finally, I’m back and as promised I’ll write about the wedding dress journey.  The bride wanted something simple and considering she lives in Chicago, I determined that we wouldn’t make any style that required any inner corset or boning.  Too many fitting challenges with that and the duct tape mannequin wasn’t working out as I had planned.  I really should have filled it with foam but didn’t have the time.

 

Here is the dress finished.  The bride was on her way outside for pictures before the ceremony.  Unfortunately, the photographer neglected to take the traditional wall portrait pose and this is the closest I have of the dress and my beautiful daughter.  It’s not a great picture, not worthy of the wall portrait, but you can see the dress clearly.

 

It consisted of an underdress made of duchess satin.  I made all my fitting adjustments on this, intending to mold the lace over it.  The bride wanted allover lace, so I chose a wide one that had a nice pattern and border for the skirt, with designs that I could cut apart and applique on the bodice.  Unfortunately, in a moment of insanity, I chose beaded lace….so that as I cut apart the lace for the bodice the beads came apart.  Beads all over the house.  This led to endless hours hand stitching the appliques and replacing the beads.  I think I spent about 600 hours of hand stitching on the lace.  But she loved it and that’s all that counts.  I also made a detachable train out of netting and pearl trim to give the effect of a ghost train.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t show in the picture.

Here are the construction steps:

First I just draped the lace to figure out the placement of the designs and how the skirt would look.  I needed to work from the bottom up and the top down, blending in the laces at the waist, so lace motifs at the waist line to hide the seams was very important.

 

Next, I cut square of lace large enough for the front skirt and the back skirt.  They had to be cut around the motifs and a little larger because I needed to overlap them at the side seams and blend them together.

 

I pinned the skirt pieces over the underdress and draped the side seams.  I pulled the skirt out at the side and pinned the lace in place on each side of the side seams.

 

Next came the hand stitching.  I laid the skirt flat and overlapped the two lace pieces.  I hand stitched around the motifs and cut away the excess on the back.

 

Then I started on the bodice. I cut out the motifs and placed some soft netting on top of the underdress.  I arranged the motifs until I had a design I liked then I took the netting off the mannequin and stitched the motifs to the net using a fell stitch.  I traced the bodice pattern pieces on some medical table paper and put the net on top to insure that the design would maintain the proper shape.  All the hand stitching was done on top of the medical tracing paper.

 

Here, I am working on the back.

 

Here is where I blended the skirt and bodice together to give the dress a seamless appearance.

 

I also devised a method for an offset zipper underneath the bridal loops for extra security.  I’ll have that available in a separate post.

This was the biggest challenge of my sewing life.   There were many panicky moments that I wouldn’t finish in time, but I eventually did and she loved it.  I’m glad it’s done and I’m glad my youngest daughter found the wedding dress of her dreams at Kleinfeld’s for her wedding next November.  She didn’t want to put me through that stress again so instead, I’m making the veil, flower girl dress and a surprise that I can’t tell about yet.