THAT Dress

Mine and Joe's first wedding anniversary is in two weeks, as weird as that is to say. So, in honor of that milestone, I should probably post my wedding dress. There was a lot of blogging that happened during the making of said dress (I even documented it in my M.Arch portfolio), but after the wedding, our honeymoon took us right to the start of grad school for me, which just about shut down my life outside of studio until....May? So here it is. The grand reveal, unless you were there, or saw the many, many photos uploaded to my flickr.



Honestly, this was the most frightening thing I've made in my life. And the most expensive. It was my first time working with silk charmeuse and real silk chiffon. This lady, minus the invisible zipper and spiral steel boning (but including the thread!) is 100% silk. Charmeuse for the bodice and skirt, organza interlining, chiffon overskirt, and silk crepe lining. It felt ahhhh-mazing on my body.





Which brings us to the fit. Overall, I'm quite happy with the fit of the dress. But in the last couple months before the wedding, after this monster was finally under construction after over a year of muslins and small tweaks to my-drafted pattern, I had lost a tiny bit of weight. Mostly out of my waist and my boobs (which is bullshit, btw), so there is a bit of unplanned ease in the bodice. In some of the photos, you can see it rippling. I cannot even explain the emotional experience that was the final fitting. But this is a close approximation: a) "holy shit! This is my wedding dress!" b) "omg! I made this!" b) "wah! I can see EVERY SINGLE MISTAKE and it is NOT PERFECT!" But I'm pretty sure on the day of, I didn't care. I just wanted to get my nuptials on and go the hell on vacation. Also, it was totally gratifying to see everyone's brain explode when they found out I made my dress.



Oh, P.S. I made all those bridesmaid dresses too.