Helping Brides Make Their Own Wedding Dresses
If you follow this blog, you know by now that I love making wedding dresses for others and I loved making my own wedding dress. You also know I love teaching. So naturally, I love love love helping crafty brides make their own wedding dresses! In this post, I’ll share how I helped three local brides create […]
Sally’s Photo Shoot and Final Fitting
HOORAY!!! After months of sewing and scheming, Sally’s custom wedding dress was finally finished and looking like the sketch. It was time for the photo shoot and final fitting! Even though these events happened on different days, I decided to make this post a full-fledged photo-fest sharing staged shots of the dress on the form […]
A Couture Tour of Sally’s Wedding Dress
After all the designing, patternmaking, fitting, and finishing, Sally’s custom wedding dress was finally complete. Before the fancy photoshoot and Sally’s final trip to the studio, I took some detail shots on the table and on the dressform as a little tour. The nature of the wrap dress made it uniquely easy to show off […]
Finishing Touches for Sally’s Dress!
After the linings and closures were complete, there were still a few finishing touches to add before Sally’s custom wedding dress would be ready for delivery day. The waist stay The first was to add a waist stay. A waist stay is essentially a little belt hidden inside the dress so that the dress’s waist […]
Buttoning Things Up: Sally’s Closures and Linings
In my last post about Sally’s custom wedding dress, most of the major seams were permanently constructed. This is a bit different from the custom couture process I usually follow. Once I got into construction phase of Sally’s custom wedding dress, with all the asymmetry and stripe matching, I realized that skipping a step (that I never skip!) […]
Gutsy Moves: Inside Sally’s Stripes
After all the fabric was cut and underlined for Sally’s asymmetrical striped custom wedding dress, it was finally time for construction. I love being able to see all the guts of the garment before the lining is added for a beautiful clean finish. Don’t you? While it is impossible for stripes to match everywhere in a fitted […]
Cutting and Underlining Sally’s Stripes
After our two mockup fittings, I was finally ready to start cutting and preparing Sally’s custom wedding dress fabrics! During our design process, we spent a lot of time searching for the perfect stripe. We finally found a silk organza with the exact width of stripe that Sally was looking for. It had a solid […]
Sally’s Mockup Fittings
After the mockup version of her custom wedding dress was ready, Sally visited my studio for her mockup fittings. This is arguably the most important part of the custom process. The mockup is your laboratory. It’s where all the experiments and discoveries happen. With no risk of ruining anything precious, you get to work out all […]
Making a Mockup with Sally’s Stripes
When creating something custom, there’s a lot of trial and error. Every new design is an experiment and so is every new body. I actually find this freeing rather than frustrating. In custom, you don’t have the same expectations for perfection that you would if you had a set of blueprints and directions to follow. […]
