the wedding dress is finished!!!

a long time ago i agreed to make a wedding dress for my sister. future me always has lots of time on her hands. thankfully the dress is FINISHED and has been shipped 1600 miles to it's very eager recipient. i waited on pins and needles (no pun intended...) and with untold anxiety until it got there and ya know, got zipped into.


you see, i am a terribly anxious person with a disproportionate amount of self-doubt. yes, the dress fit her just fine a month and a half ago when she visited me and tried it on, but many many many many many many hours of work later i had it in my head that the dress had somehow morphed into some ridiculously ill-fitting shape. or that the dress fell apart entirely during shipping. or it changed colors between here and there. or that it would just be awful all over. or...

or perhaps we should just get out of my head now and talk about the dress! when last i posted i was showing the bodice interior. i finished up the bodice with a hand picked standard centered zipper. i just don't trust an invisible zipper to handle the number of layers going on in the bodice. i've never had one fail me, but this was not something i was about to risk! since i was hand picking i decided to add some small beads with each pick stitch. can't say i've ever seen this done before, but i think it does look pretty and adds a special touch to an otherwise mundane thing. 

the waist sash is made from a dark teal satin that
will be used for the bridesmaid dresses

of course, a wedding dress just isn't a wedding dress until there is some silk involved. i decided to surprise her by adding a silk lining to the bodice. my hope is that it will be nice and soft to the skin as well as a touch cooling since the rest of the dress is a stiflingly hot polyester. also, i hand stitched a tag with their names and wedding date.

as you can tell, i've been going for a classic timeless look. but i wasn't about to leave it without embellishment! and so i began a saga with lace. the lace i used is actually leftover from what was used on my wedding dress, which was made by a family friend, and is ten years old. this lace is rather a collection of floral motifs on netting that has cording to outline the details. so i cut out the individual flower motifs then dyed them from their original bright white to ivory.


oh the lace... the lace could practically be a post in and of itself, but i'll spare you the drama. i began with a tea dye and ended up with an ivory color, but next to the dress it just looked brown and dirty. so i washed the lace to remove some of the tea color then used a heavily diluted RIT dye in golden yellow to change the tone to match the fabric closer. after much duress i finally ended up with a color i was happy with. i kept reading about how polyester won't take dye and this and that... turns out it will, as i highly doubt this lace is cotton or silk.

once the lace was dyed, i stitched it all on. by hand. i thought i was going to lose my mind! i really don't want to admit how many hours i spent on that lace, from cutting to dying to sewing... i kept thinking: i know it's pretty, but is it this many hours pretty? please just don't tell me if it's not...

i will most definitely post actual pics of the dress on the bride when
the time comes! i just had to show off my work before that.

honestly, i exhausted myself on this dress (and i didn't even tell you about how i hand stitched the hem... twice) so having a little distance from it (literally!) and knowing that it arrived safely and all of those awful things i imagined happening didn't... i am immensely proud of my work. it isn't perfect and i know it's every flaw (please don't feel obliged to point out my mistakes), but come on... i made a wedding dress!. and as a bonus i now know that wedding dress making is NOT something i will ever make a living at, and hopefully it will be many years before i am stupid enough to undertake such a project ever again! the end.






—lisa g