Yes, I said YES!

Photos by Juraj Ladziansky of www.35mil.co.uk
Wedding dress: by me

Yes, exactly, I said YES to my amazing Bart and here we go - wedding to be sorted. As you know I'm on 'no-clothes-shopping' policy since 14 March 2011, and I didn't want to break it now. And budget was playing it's role as well, let's face it.
So... The options were - go for vintage, go for second-hand, or go your own way and DIY. You know me. I made my own wedding dress and I did it my way.

First of all there was a dilemma, how someone like me - without proper tailoring skills - can make the bodice of the dress and basically the whole dress to look good enough to be presented in front of all family and friends. Mhm... Easy one, once I digged into my 'to-be-upcycled' department.

Initially, I had idea of finding the dress for upcycle and transform it into wearable wedding option. I knew I will have to play around and adjust my husband's suit and all decor to my dress colour scheme and style. So I digged out this pretty black evening dress from the friend of mine - the dress was damaged at the bottom part, but I wanted to use only bodice anyway. I started to work, cut off damaged pieces and dressed my figurine to see what could I do with it. Then I had this wise moment and finally tried the bodice on myself - horror! It was so tight - I could wear it, but not for 12 hours... (The moral of this story - don't trust labels and try it on yourself first. Always.)

And I was at the beginning. As I was back to digging in piles, I came across with my own dress, which I bought about 3 years ago for £17 in TK Maxx (UE version of TJ Maxx). I wore this dress on few occasions, but then some threads got loose, my interest went down, I bought some new dresses and forgot about this one.

 

 

This is probably the only picture of this dress what I have from my single times . Back then I would never say this will be one day my wedding dress and even more - that this will be my husband (we were dating only for couple of months). Never say never....

 

The main points I had to do with my dress:

- fix all loose threads (especially black embroidery)

- redo zipper so it's invisible

- fix new silicon boning into corset part - these were loose and came out at one party - and I just threw them away...

- figure out what to do with stain at the back - the stain was from storing it with some coloured item together. I tried washing, and then tie dye in tea. Nope, since it's polyester, nothing has changed. But the stain was so light and only visible to me (because I knew where it was). I washed dress few times during creating, so at the end it disappeared.

- make it into LONG wedding dress

And this is a part where I will describe more. The bottom of dress consist of satin lining with 3 ruffles above. I never notice the lining was actually sewn in error - inside out. Only when I start to refashion it, I noticed. First I wanted to cut lining off, but then I realised I need to keep it so I have base for longer top skirts. Now - bottom skirt of my long dress is cut from 3 circle pieces of satin. The top part is cut from 4 pieces of ciffon. Ruffled at the top and sewn on original lining. To make sure I don't end up in some funny videos of brides loosing their dress during wild dance, I supported both lining and top layers of skirt with extra stripe of fabric, which I sewn inside under lining (so it's visible from inside of the dress) and sewn all together two more times (if that makes sense). To finish it nicely, I hand sewn zipper, so there's no stitching visible.

Up till here everything went more less OK and fast. BUT you cannot make long wedding dress cut in circles in right length unless someone helps you. So I put my wedding shoes on (my mum's silver wedding shoes actually), I put crinoline on (borrowed from neighbour) and I tried the dress on. Then I gave all pins to my amazing cousin Barbora, who had to knee and pin the length exactly in measurement I wanted - satin layer 4cm and chiffon layer 3cm above ground. Since this is cut in circle, there's no magic formula for making length right except doing it this way. Every crinoline will push the dress different way, each pair of shoes will make the length slightly different. So I used everything as it was planned for wedding.
 

I cannot upload more pictures neither I cannot make these bigger. BUT I will upload some on my Facebook and to my Tumblr. Or click on photo and it should show large image...

 

 

 

 

Photos by Juraj Ladziansky of www.35mil.co.uk