My Wedding Dress

This post is a bit special for two reasons: First, today is the anniversary of my inaugural post! One year old already! A great time to reflect how infrequently I have posted this past year and how determined I am to post more often in the coming one. Second, I made my wedding dress! Independent of how I feel about the garment, I suppose the occasion deserves a short post on its own. Here is the short story of how my wedding dress came to be.

The decision:

Back in July 2015, Matt and I got engaged! I ~~quickly~~ immediately decided I was going to sew my wedding dress. I am still a newbie at dressmaking and though I had read many things suggesting making your own dress was a stressful add-on to an already stressful process, I couldn’t let this opportunity pass me by!

The inspiration:

A piece of advice that I was quick to follow was to choose a simple pattern for the dress. I looked at countless pictures of wedding dresses both past and present to get an idea what I liked and, most importantly, what I was confident I could achieve. Matt and I share a love for all things “mid-century” so it seemed natural to go with that theme for our wedding. I love Candy Anthony 1950’s inspired shorter wedding dresses. They are so pretty and danceable: spinning all night to our favorite music was one the things I looked forward to most! I drafted the sweetheart bustier when working on this project and I was pretty happy with it. I pretty much redid that same garment for the wedding dress.

The fabric:

I used ivory miyuki stretch satin which is lightweight and drapes very nicely. I underlined the bodice with organza and lined it with ivory voile. I used a soft off-white polka dot tulle for the overlay. At first, I didn’t plan to overlay the entire dress, but I found the satin to be a bit too shiny, so I added the overlay to cut down the sheen. I’m glad I did because I love how the dress ended up looking!

The details:

Just like this project, my wedding dress is actually two separate pieces:

the sweetheart bustier closed at the back with a lapped zipper.
the circle skirt with an invisible zipper on the side and semi attached top belt that closes at the back under the bow.

There is probably a better way to do this, but this is how I envisioned it. Oh, and I used horsehair to hem the skirt. Horsehair is awesome to provide a bit of structure and volume!

What I didn’t do:

I planned to sew a little jacket to wear outside, something similar to this. But time ran short so I just bought a little ivory cardigan and covered its buttons with my dress’s stretch satin.
The petticoat is a vintage find.

Thanks for reading! Here some pictures: