A wedding dress for my Sister (first part: mood board, designing and finding fabrics)
Hello dear readers!
No no, it is not the title of a new romantic movie I have seen! These last months I have been working on a wedding dress for my Sister. When I learned she was getting married I could not let her choose a dress from anywhere I wanted it to be her dress and I wanted her to be happy with it. You know how for some women it is important to have THE dress for their wedding. And what is more inspiring than creating it for your lovely sister?
We worked on this project since the end of November. As she is living in Sri Lanka and me in the UK, we had to find a solution to communicate easily. So we worked with a Pinterest table to summarise our ideas together. She was hesitating between a backless dress or three pieces dress.
The principal idea we agreed on at first was the fact that she wanted the dress fluid and kind of bohemian. The second is that she did not want it to be all white. So we chose to use white and old pink as an inspiration for the dress. And we decided together to go for a three pieces dress. She is these kind of girl super thin and I was sure it would be perfect to put her to her advantage.First it is modern and correspond to both of our personalities and second it was easier for me to sew and to adjust to her size as she was 10 000 km away from me and we could not make some tests before she could wear the dress!
Here is our final mood board! 🙂
As we both had a general idea of the shape of the dress. A two-coloured skirt with fluid materials, a bralette to cover what had to be hidden and a laced crop top. We could move to the next challenge, finding the fabrics.
After looking at all the sites I knew to find the perfect lace, I realised it was not that easy to find the design we really wanted. And finally I looked at Etsy shops which I never did before and we both fell in love with a lace from the distributor LacetoLove, it had a Gatsby style that is very trendy and I was sure that it could fit the idea we had of the dress. So I bought it directly. And in future if I had to recommend a shop for lace I would definitely choose this one!
For the other fabrics to find it was not that easy to unearth. I spent a loooooooot of time to find the perfect fabrics. For a wedding dress, you need nice materials. It has to be good quality but we had a restricted budget. It looks now like I spent an eternity on the internet and in the shops of Brighton until I found the bases I wanted, with the perfect colours to match our idea and to match the lace we chose.
For the upper layer of the dress I found it quite easily, I choose a light chiffon in white ivory from Fabric Land. But to find the pink fabric it was an enormous stress. The fabrics were to light or the quality too cheap or the colour was bad, etc. But in the end, one week before starting to sew the dress my eyes fell on a fabric sold in remnants in W&H stores, there was 4 of them of 1.50 m and I took all of them, I needed to sew the base of the skirt and also the bralette so I wanted to be sure to have enough materials.
It was such a relief when I found it, it was the perfect colour and the perfect weight. I could finally go to the next step of the project after getting my sister measurements!
So here is the first article about this big project. Next one, I will explain how I sewed it and I will show you the pictures of the dress on my beautiful sister. Thank you for following me and see you soon!
Cheers my Dears!
Manon
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