Wedding dresses are expensive. For ChocolateCookieandFudge on Imgur , her dream dress was way out of her price range.
Instead of blowing her budget, she decided to learn a whole new set of skills — wedding dress making. Let’s see what happened.
She got off to a promising start.
After finding her dream dress and passing on it due to the price, she set her mind on making her own.
But first, she needed a dress form. And since those are expensive, she… made her own.
The dress form did its job well.
She decided to map out the dress with paper first.
Yup. Paper. However, it was too stiff, so she had to go back to the drawing board and start over with some cotton.
A brave soldier fell in service to the dress.
“I wanted adjustable straps on my dress. I couldn’t find the little plastic loop things anywhere so I sacrificed an old bra. Its memory will be in our mind forever.”
She made an outer and inner lining.
“It allowed the outer layer to move more freely and added some opacity to the silk.”
She didn’t want to flash everyone on her special day, after all. Plus, better twirling!
Math was required.
“Trying to tidy up the line around the low cut back. All the maths I’ve learned came into play to get something nice and symmetrical. Stay in school, kids.”
Math: It actually does come in handy!
And some backup was called in.
The two layers weren’t quite enough to keep everything…in its place, shall we say?
“On a cold day, I looked like a “raisin smuggler”. So I bought some bra forms and sewed them on the inside of the lining.”
Time for the outer dress.
This should go fine, right? She already did a whole under layer, after all.
Nope. To no one’s surprise, the outer layer was much harder to tackle, and required more careful sewing.
A layer of organza turned out to be crucial.
“You see, you can’t really sew the lace like you would do with fabric. It’s very heavy, the lace wouldn’t keep its shape and the flowery pattern would look like crap. Soooo, I made a layer out of organza and sewed the lace on it.
The lace came next.
After a lot of struggle with the sleeves, she was ready to lay the lace over a layer of organza.
“I positioned the first length across the shoulder like a poncho. This way I wouldn’t have hideous junctions on the shoulders.”
The skirt was added next.
The lace hid a lot of sins.
“Well, there were a lot of mistakes but the lace is surprisingly good at hiding them. Towards the end, my motto was ‘The lace will hide it.'”
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Almost done…
The only thing left to do? Hide any mistakes with the lace trim.
“And a nice trim to hide the last mistakes ^^. The dress was finished about 2 weeks before my flight home.”
The final result!
How absolutely beautiful does she look? The dress came out perfectly, and it’s totally custom. So few brides can say that they were involved in every step of their dress’ creation.
Here’s a look at the back:
She also added:
“In the end I don’t regret doing it now that it’s done but I’m not sure i would do it again. Also it still spent around 1000$ in material.”
