My DIY Wedding Dress: what I learned in the process

Hello Darlings!

While I don’t share much of personal details on this blog (we gathered here for sewing and nothing else, right?), but the event that took place on June 1st is just too significant not to share - after getting engaged on midnight of New Years, on the first day of Summer I got married!

For this very special occasion, I decided I would make my own dress - though far from perfect, it was so true to my essence, that it made me feel even more special on the big day.

I started making my gown 1.5 months before the wedding and I took one week off at work, so that I could focus solely on studies at sewing school and making this dress. It took whole week of 11 hours of sewing per day, 5 meters of fabric, 6 meters of tulle, hand stitching many meters of hemline (twice!!! because first time was not perfect) and unmeasurably big help of my teacher to get to this result. All in all, there couldn’t have been a better project to finish my studies - such a sweet resemblance of how designers finish their collections with wedding dresses!

It was my very first time making a gown, so I really would like to share with you what I learned in the process and what techniques I used in this Youtube video or text breakdown, followed with a few photos just below - hope you will enjoy it!

So, major tips that I learned while making this dress as my last project at sewing school: 1) Make sure that the environment you will be sewing at is spotless, because white dresses collect dirt as magnets! Make sure you clean your table, floors and also your sewing machine, because there might be some oil left on it (uhh, this is how I got a stain on my dress…). 2) If by chase you get some dirt on the dress, clean it with a piece of fabric from the same material, soaked in distilled water: contrary to regular water, distilled water will not leave any calc residues. 3) Don't start sewing too early - while it might sound like a good idea to prepare your dress months in advance, there is a risk your measurements will change when the big day will be approaching. This is in particular true for brides, as they tend to stress before the wedding, thus either lose or gain weight, so if you prepare your dress much in advance, you might need to take it in or let it out before the big day! 4) That being said, leave yourself enough time to make the dress - I started sewing mine 1.5 month prior to the wedding and it took me more than 40 hours to finish it. I have taken a week-long vacation from work, so that I can attend my sewing school full-time and made my dress during that week; so after I finished the gown, I still had some time reserved for "just in case" situation and thus I was less stressed about it. 5) Choose a pattern based on your skills - wedding fabrics can be complexed to work with, so make sure that you choose the right pattern for your fabric and your skills! 6) Take your time to find right fabric for you - and for a right price! Gowns take looots of fabric - for example, mine was not full-length, just below the knee, but I used about 5 meter of fabric for it. Luckily, I found a good deal for the fabric i used and in costed only 8 eur/meter, so in total I paid only 40 eur for entire fabric - this is was a good deal, because those wedding fabrics can easily cost 20-30 eur/meter, which would increase price for the dress significantly!

So, here is all I had to show you from about my dress. In conclusion, I would like to say that I am very glad I made my own dress because it made me feel even more special during the day.

Hope you enjoyed this post and learned something new! Thank you for reading and wishing you a wonderful week ahead!

Best wishes,

Julie