DIY Wedding Dress - Part 1

When I said « I want to do my wedding dress myself”, I felt really excited about the challenge but then… I wondered if it will be really like what I imagined, if the quality will be good enough for the big day. Why was I so crazy to do that???

Then the wedding day, I put on my dress and that was it, the dress I dreamed done with my little hands.

So here is a step by steps of how I’ve made it. It was not an easy task with a lot of mistakes as I don’t really have that much knowledge of sewing aside from Viking dresses so don’t hesitate to ask a professional to help you with the difficult parts.

First you need a sewing machine as the volume of fabric is important it would take you an enormous time to do everything by hand! Then ideally try to find a sewing mannequin or dress form at your size or if you have the budget one that is adjustable. You can find them easily on ebay or Amazon. I have a basic polystyrene one and it helped me a lot!

As you can see I put on it some style tape to have some marks of reference for the draping. Use some pins to hold the tape onto the mannequin and mark the lines that divide vertically the front and the back. Then mark horizontally the lines of the bust, waist and hips. There are a lot of video tutorials about it if you search online.

Otherwise, here are some useful accessories you can invest in:

A sharp scissor for fabric, it’s absolutely wonderful to cut the fabric perfectly!
A fabric marker, mainly to do the marks on the muslin cloth
A thread clipper scissor to remove the little threads popping from nowhere!
A seam ripper for the numerous mistakes… yes it happens!
A pin cushion, see my other tutorial to make a cute turtle!
A measure tape to… measure?
A tailor chalk really practical to mark temporarily your really expensive fabrics.

There are a lot more accessories you can use but these are the main ones I would suggest.

Now you have got everything ready… Take a paper and pencils, let your imagination works on what would be the perfect dress for you! Here is my first drawing inspired by byzantine as well as Italian fashion. Obviously, the dress is blue and gold but you can choose any colour you want and go traditional with white.