Wedding dress part 8 - long overdue!

Well the wedding has been and gone and I still have a lot to update. We met again another couple of times to finalise all the bits of the dress.

We discovered why all-over chantilly beaded lace wedding dresses are rare - the weight of the beads will make the lace hem drop many inches (many!). Keep it hanging for as long as possible, and don't forget that the hoop makes the hem rise so try it on with the hoop before guaging the correct trim length.

Another thing we discovered was that it is better to raise the hem at the very front of the dress by an inch or more. This is because, unless you plan to spend the whole day standing straight as an arrow and never bending down, or walking, you will trip over the front of the dress. The last panic you need is to tread on the dress halfway up the aisle and go flying!

We had another mini crisis when, no matter how much we tightened the bodice under the bust line, the weight of the dress just kept making the top drop down and the 'girls' fall out (what there is of them!). So we eventually conceded that straps were going to have to happen. This was a quick photo sent to a friend to see what she thought of the one-shoulder mock-up lace bolero with straps. It wasn't ideal, but I wanted to feel confident on the day, with no panicking that my dress would slip, so we added them in. And instantly I walked differently and relaxed much more in the dress, so it was the right move.

So here is the dress pretty much done. Still the lace hem to raise, and the scallops to add - my mum did all of this while I stood on the table next to me and tried to stand as still as possible. Even still she was stuck on her hands and knees probably in loads of pain trying to get the hem as perfect as possible. This bit is hard. You have to stand up straight, but at the same time, this isn't going to be your standard pose throughout the day, so remember that extra inch or so at the front for walking, getting up stairs, slouching, bending forward etc.

My sister popped around at this point to show me her bridesmaid dress as I hadn't seen it on yet - lovely and summery! We had it altered elsewhere as we were so busy with the dress, and the perfectionist in us wasn't best pleased at the mis-matching thread for the hem, but it couldn't be seen and the dress looked so perfect! I'm obsessed with no shiny fabrics and I think the matt for myself and the bridesmaids is so flattering.

The two photos above show the bustling, as we could find very little information online about how to do this. Plenty of examples of different types, but nothing detailing exactly the steps. Even the wedding dress book we bought didn't have anything. So it is clear buttons and poppers on ivory satin - probably best to embiggen these by clicking on them!

What we did was this:

• attach the lining at the seam points to the satin using extra-strong thread with about an inch of give so nothing puckers. You find these on most shop-bought skirts with linings from good shops so you can see what I mean.
• attach clear buttons to the underside of the satin at the hem as can be seen in the top photo. One at the centre back seam, and then as many as you want on side seams. We did 5 buttons in total.
• Then the difficult bit - measure from the centre front bodice down to the bottom hem. Use this measurement to measure from the centre back bodice down. The end of the measurement will be where you'll be turning the satin under. Use this to find where you're going to have to attach the loop for the button to attach to.
• The loop was made using the toughest, strongest thread we could find and the bottom photo shows it. There is a name for this technique but I forget it - it's like a knotting thing that strengthens it. Further strengthened by adding a square of interfacing to the back of the lining so that when the loop is sewn on it doesn't just tear through the thin lining as this loop is threaded to the lining only. That way everything is invisible on the right side of the dress. (and this is why you attached the lining to the dress at the hemline - stops the lining from falling and bunching up in the fold)
• I found that even with 5 buttons, when the satin was folded underneath and buttoned it created 'pockets' that when I stepped back there was a danger of sticking my heel into. So I bought eleventy-billion clear poppers and made poppers so that I could snap the satin inbetween the buttons onto the lining too.

This is a bit of a spoiler photo as it was taken on the day, but it shows what we did with the lace on the outside. We took the bottom button of the buttons sewn onto the top of the centre back and sewed this on with the super-tough thread. Then we found the right point of the centre back seam on the lace and sewed a strong loop on here. Due to the holey lace we just pulled the loop to the underside of the lace until we were ready to bustle and no-one could see it at all. It changed the look of the dress for the evening perfectly! (Yes, it is evening - I come from Scotland, where it is light until 11pm in the summer!)

Next blog post for veil and final photos on the day!

Wedding dress part 7a - putting together the final dress

When I arrived back, we were ready to start putting the final dress pieces together. I say we, I mean my mum. I am not confident enough, and with 7 seams, even a millimetre out on each seam is 1.4cm extra or too little on the dress. So I worked on sewing the lining pieces and remaking the petticoat.

I bought one from eBay after searching everywhere for one with a Lycra stretch top instead of the many many out there with a drawstring. Surely you can see a drawstring through a wedding dress?! Anyhoo, once it arrived, the net was really scratchy and strand-up-on-it's-own rigid. So I measured it and bought some replacement veil net in the softest drapiest I could find. I don't need a lot of extra volume for my dress. I also bought more Lycra to add a panel and lower where the net starts, as it was too high for my dress.

I'm quite impressed with my handiwork!

And now for the dress - so stunning as it currently stands.

Wedding dress post 6 - the cutting out

I went up north to see my mum for this bit, as she has much more space in her house. I had the huge roll of satin, the lace and my Singer sewing machine. We had 5 days to get as much as possible done so hit the ground running...

My advice for the cutting of the fabric - imagine how long it will take and then quadruple it. Unless you are using cheap easily replaceable fabric (unlikely!), you will need to spend a lot (a lot!) of time thinking and measuring before cutting.

Also, because by the time we got to cutting the final fabric we'd made seven bodices and three skirts, I would advise always date adjustments in your notebook, and when drawing amendments on paper patterns, pick a colour and write next to your dated amendment what colour you used. Ideally once the amendments have been made, redraw new paper pattern pieces, as inevitably you will make more amendments. Don't end up like us, with multiple colours and no idea which was the most recent! We had to cut up the satin dress and use it for making new paper pattern pieces in the end. This was a huge shame because that dress could have been donated to a theatre company or something. It still might if we get around to restitching the pieces (I imagine it'll take a stiff drink though to encourage us to pick up the needles for this again though!)

Before cutting, we consulted the Bridal Couture book again, and I took the opportunity to wear the satin dress for a bit, to check the fit while moving around and sitting, and most importantly, to check I could breathe properly!

We spent an hour convinced we hadn't ordered enough satin because it wasn't fitting the pattern layout, despite having done mock ups with the pattern pieces months ago on the kitchen floor, and having made the satin dress a fortnight before. Angry phone calls to Butterick were planned!

As it turned out, the only problem was that we had put the piece on right side up instead of wrong side up. The simplest of things, but the nerves and tension are high with the pressure of getting it right. Our saving grace a million times was that there was two of us, constantly checking each others decisions and making sure we were doing it right.

Luckily, we have a great mother-daughter relationship, and as I mentioned at one point during our chats, we haven't yet reached a stage where one of us is sitting outside on the doorstep, while the other implores them to stop crying and carry on!

The satin all laid out in the hall in a desperate bid to avoid creases.

The advice out there said not to pin the paper pieces to the satin, or put any tracing wheel/fabric pencil marks. There wasn't much advice on how then to go about cutting out the pieces. So we went with measure straight of grain (x1000 times) then place Caithness glass paperweights. Keep all pins inside the seam allowance. Add tacking threads at points, and then cut the fabric. Very very carefully.

Get distracted and photograph pretty wedding shoes sparkling ...

... before moving on to the lace. This was the most stressful part, as I had some difficulty getting it in the first place at a cheap price. One shop had it for £185 a metre! As I needed 7 metres that just wasn't an option. Fortunately I found it direct from a mill for £34 a metre. However, the 7 metres I had was all that they had. Screw this up, and that was it, until mid-May when they are expecting their next shipment. Given that the wedding is mid-June, that is just too close. So with that tiny bit of pressure hanging over us, we began ...

... by taking photos of it sparkling in the sunlight, and just couldn't give it the justice it deserves. It's stunning, stunning fabric. One of the main things we learned from cutting lace were (and we even read this, but didn't absorb it so I'll write it in bold) if you're not sure how the pattern of the lace is going to look, lay the pattern piece underneath the lace. Such a simple sentence. Yet we spent at least a couple of hours thinking the pattern was going the wrong way for the train and it never occurred to us to check by simply placing the lace over the pattern - it's see through after all.

You see, we had heard that lace doesn't have a straight of grain, but we decided we weren't confident enough to test this theory (we're still not sure whether it's true or not) and so we decided cut the pieces making sure that the lace pattern ran straight along the straight of grain line. Here's a photo of a sketch;

You see? The lines show the direction of the lace pattern. although not completely straight, it fans out nicely at the bottom. Except, when we had cut out all the pieces (fanning out nicely) for the front, front side and back side pieces I had a moment of doubt. I was convinced that the final two back train pieces still to be cut out were going to 'fan in' and be the reverse of the rest of the skirt. We tried turning the pieces to go the opposite direction, but the pattern was too clearly defined as one way and it would definitely look upside down, even if it fanned out instead of in.

I have to confess to a moment of nausea at this point. After a couple of hours talking about adding appliqués down the train to hide the worst, we suddenly realised that there wasn't a problem at all! We double-checked after mum had the idea to lay the pattern piece underneath the lace - it was confirmed. Worrying for nothing!

The lace front pieces laid out, with the scalloped edge laid over to get an idea of how it'll finally look. So after five days, all the pieces were cut out, and I went home for a rest, ready to come back a for Easter weekend.

Wedding dress post 5 - the satin practice

This was a 4 day sewing-fest to make up a practice dress from the donated duchess satin. Mum came down to Glasgow to spend time here and had made a 2nd practice dress in cotton fabric, based on the blue one I had made and tried on whilst up north, and a whole bunch of measurements we'd taken.

It was a perfect fit around the hips and skirt area, so we used it to draw over the existing paper pattern pieces and make new paper pieces to cut out the satin.

But first, we decided to make the bodice fit better and get some practice using all the layers. The bodice requires an underlining (which is made up of iron-on interfacing and lining pieces), the main fabric (which is made up of lining and satin pieces, although we used some cotton instead of satin for this run) and finally the lace. So all in all, we had to cut out each bodice piece (of which there are 7) five times! All for that teeny tiny result below.

So (heavily cropped to preserve some modesty!) my mum put all this together. The bust wasn't quite fitting right, so we turned it inside out and just pinned it until it felt more right.

Then, having made new paper pattern pieces by marking the bodice and taking it apart, we moved onto the satin one.

This seemed to fit a lot better. The wrinkles at the bust are the result of a combination of things, like the weight of the dress isn't helping to smooth everything yet, we haven't snipped enough shaping triangles out yet (we found that 4 seemed to work nice in the end, for my wee C-cup) and hurried steaming of the seams.

One thing we also discovered is that there is lots of warnings out there about satin. Here's what we found; satin creased is probably final - if you have no magic hide-all lace overlay, be careful! That said, we did manage to remove most creases with the iron so it wasn't catastrophic. Some people had disasters putting pins in that left marks and holes - we found that using thin new steel pins meant that we didn't have this problem. Again, that said, we didn't go pinning like crazy into the satin outwith the seam allowances, and certainly would advise avoiding pins wherever you can, just in case.

We discovered when adding the boning, that it should be chopped so it's shorter than the seam allowance. We initially thought that 5/8" less at the top and bottom would be sufficient, but you also need a bit extra to turn all those layers over and then stitch the very top of the bodice. So chop a wee tiny bit more off. The pattern suggested boning caps - these just added too much bulk and were noticeable so we discarded them and made sure instead to cut nice rounded ends on the boning. But I can't feel it at all through all the layers anyway.

Also - pay heed to the 'boning placement line' and the 'straight of grain line'. Don't get these mixed up - we did!

So after the bodice, came the skirt. We went to my work, which has large tables, and used them to cut out the satin. Not many pictures of the actual process of cutting out the pieces, or putting them together, so here's a rainbow we spotted out the window before we left!

And then - the satin dress!

Obviously much whiter and shinier than my final dress, and without the lining or petticoat to make it less see-through, but we were delighted. My mum even cried a bit!

We learned from this practice, that adding the weight of the skirt pulled the bodice down quite a bit. In fact we decided to add an inch to the top of the bodice to give me some more modesty. But other than that, the fit was pretty bang on.

And we learned a valuable lesson about boning. Now boning (at least where I live) comes on a roll, and you ask for it by the metre. Pay attention to which way it curves. You want to pin it on the underlining of the bodice curving the wrong way, because once the underlining is flipped over and fitted to the sating/lining/lace pieces it will right itself. I don't know how to explain it more clearly, and it's a bit of a mindbender, but you'll figure it out as long as you're looking for it. As we did it right on one side of the bodice, and wrong on the other out of chance, the photos from a bride's view should demonstrate the importance of getting the curvature the right way round.

Above: wrong way - gaping out a bit under the arm. I imagine that as the day goes on, and the weight of the dress continues to pull, this could get worse.

Below: right way - curving into the body. The weight of the dress will only make this pull snugger, so should help with ensuring the boobs don't fall out - hopefully! And it looks much more tailored and smart.

So that's it for now. We went away, feeling much more confident about the dress, and how it was going.

Wedding Dress - post 4. Shopping

Went to Mandors yesterday to buy all the extra bits to go with the duchess satin for the practice dress. Couldn't decide between iron-on interfacing for the bodice, or sew-on interfacing. Decided to go for my mum's genius idea of making half the bodice in one interfacing and half in the other to see which I prefer.

For the same reason I bought half the boning in satin-covered and half in cotton-covered for the bodice.

Mum also thinks that with my (severely pear-shaped) body shape, it would make a better fit if the zip at the back is replaced with a lace-up back instead. Searched Mandors, Remnant Kings and John Lewis for Rouleau loops with no joy. Mandors had one with little elasticated loops for those wee buttons, but we need ones strong enough to hold the weight of the dress and hold me in when it's laced up. This place makes them with your own satin and is UK-based, so might be an option. My mum's confident she can make these though.

I also received all my matt satin swatches in the post - the one I think I'm going to go for is one of the matt ones here from Bridal Fabrics. I'm going to have to phone them though, as not sure about how they parcel up satin for postage. If it's folded then the creases will probably never come out, but otherwise it's going to have to be shipped in a huge postal tube ... So far I've ordered some satin and lace swatches from them, and they've been great. Next day delivery, and good sized swatches, even of the lace, which was £85 a metre. Approx 10cm x 20cm size

Wedding dress Part 3 - the plan

OK - coming up with a schedule to keep on track with, so I can get this dress done by the end of May, and leave myself a fortnight to deal with all the other wedding preparations.

February
Buy all the final fabric, buttons and duplicate zips, boning etc.

March
Finish fittings on practice fabric. Take apart and remake with Duchess Satin kindly donated by Paula's mum, which is 115cm wide, by 7m. This should be enough to make 2nd practice dress, which will include zip and boning.
Refittings as necc.

April - May
Make dress proper

Wedding Dress Part 2 - the research and tips

This post contains all the research and reading I've been doing, as I have never made a dress before, let alone a wedding dress. Am I foolhardy? Well, my mum made her dress, my friend's mum used to make wedding dresses for a living, and I've got confidence! So let's see how this plays out...

First off, the wedding dress bible; Susan Khalje's "Bridal Couture: Fine Sewing Techniques for Wedding Gowns and Evening Wear". Although out of print (I borrowed a copy from my library), this can now be bought on CD here, and I would say it's an essential purchase.

Tips I've learned from here include: what kind of underlining to use, how different fabrics work together, how to shape and fit all aspects, and most importantly for me, how lace can be invisibly seamed and worked with. It includes different types of bustles, and all aspects of construction.

And other stuff I've found online that might help with making the dress [this is going to be continually edited as I find more information]

The muslin and starting out

PatternReview.com review of my pattern which includes the calming words "for a wedding gown the pattern was fairly easy for anyone with average sewing skills. There were a lot of steps, 65 in all, so it took some time to make it, but it went smoothly"

Deconstructing the practice muslin dress

The cutting and construction


Tips

• Making sure your selvedge is on the grain 
• Once fabric is ironed, fashion a way to have it go straight on the roll after coming off the ironing board
• DO NOT CUT THE FINAL FABRIC UNTIL THE MUSLIN FITS PERFECTLY

Working with satin

• Don't cut satin on the fold even if the pattern piece says so - creases on satin can be permanent! 
• Watch out for satin fraying on the bodice
• Some tips here including use a "with nap" cutting layout – satins tend to shade in different directions.

Underlining

• Underlining with silk organza Underlining is neccesary for many reasons I'm discovering; to provide a place to hem the satin invisibly - hem it to the underlining. Sew it to the satin (different websites give different advice as to whether they are hand or machine sewn together) before cutting out the pieces, and use it to mark the various bits of the pattern, darts, folds and so on so the satin is never marked in any way.
• Mandors advice on underlining: "I wouldn't think that silk organza would make a good lining. I'd go with silk habotai, or just a nice bremsilk lining" - i think confusion - I think when websites talk of 'underlining' with silk organza they actually mean interfacing

Waist Stay
What is a waist stay? Basically it is attached to the dress at the bottom of the bodice like a bra strap, and holds the skirt up, so you don't spend the day in a strapless dress hoiking it up so the girls don't fall out. Tip; use bra back closures found at fabric shops.

Boning - some very good advice on boning here and some photos of boning being done.

Info gleaned from many places including, The Wedding Dress Saga blog