DIY Wedding Dress - Part 2

Now you have your idea of dress, you need to think about how you are going to build it step by step. You can use some existing patterns to help you.

I decided to try to drape and model my dress using some tailoring technics. Again you can find some really good tutorials on the Web.

First, let’s have a look at the shape of the dress.

We will have two main parts to do. First, you can apply some tape onto the mannequin to define the main shapes.

Then take a rectangle of non-stretching fabric for the test. Do a mark to define the middle vertical line. Trace it with a ruler.

Place your fabric back onto the mannequin and mark the bust, waist and hips lines, then use a triangle ruler to trace the horizontal lines.

Place your fabric back on the mannequin pinning it. You will see that between the central and the side line you have too much fabric. Pinch the fabric and pin. Mark it with a pencil.

Now you can work on the back part of the mannequin. Trace the central line after marking it. Again trace the horizontal lines for the bust, waist and hips. Pin it onto the mannequin and pinch the surplus of fabric then mark it.

If the mannequin is not exactly at your size you should copy the two parts onto two new rectangle, stitch them together and try it on to see if it fits.

You can also work on the lower part as I did on the picture to help you with the skirt.

Here I’ve draped as well the upper layer of the dress as it is different and I wanted the back part to be opened.

We will see in the next article how to choose the fabric and begin the dress!