A Vision Realized

Although I’ve been in art school for over half of my life and done countless creative projects, the most challenging and rewarding one I’ve done to date is stepping into a craft completely unknown to me by making my own wedding dress.

My fiance and I got engaged in August of 2020 and I immediately hit Etsy to find my wedding dress. I find it important to mention that my job is wedding photography, so every year I see countless brides in countless dresses and what was in style had become dull after awhile. After looking through every website I could and even reaching out to a couple wedding dress designers, I was still at a loss for finding the perfect dress for me. I’d expressed my frustrations to my then fiance and he called me a little bit later to tell me that he really felt like I should make my own wedding dress and that the Lord would bless my hands to do so.

I’d already thought about making my own wedding dress, mainly because I wanted to cut the budget in as many places as possible for the wedding, but strayed away from the idea because my sewing experience was only four months old and consisted entirely of making facial masks. After his prompting, I shifted my perspective and began looking up dress patterns that I could jimmy together to make my dream dress, again with no avail. Shortly after my switching the game plan we were at church, worshiping, and I saw myself getting married with full detail of exactly what my wedding dress looked like. I drew it out and set that as my plan for what I was going to make my dress look like, again, having absolutely no experience in fashion design or construction.

As previously mentioned, I love a good save on money and attempted to make my own dress form so I wouldn’t have to buy one. I had my fiance wrap my torso in saran wrap and three or so layers of various duct tape colors since we kept going through the ends of all our rolls. My sister grabbed my fabric scissors and released me from my personal sauna so I could tape the form back up and fill it with insulation foam. After emptying a couple cans I realized that this just wasn't going anywhere and felt hopeless. Thankfully, my fiance urged me to just go ahead and buy the dress form that I needed and thanks to prime shipping it arrived 48 hours for me to actually get started on my dress, just a short 35 days before the wedding.

Bless Nick Verreos and his youtube channel! After watching him make his niece’s prom dress, I was confident I could make my own wedding dress. So I set to work and spent a good amount of time draping a fairly intricate bustier with 8 panels. One of my greatest little victories was sewing the boning in on my bodice (there may have even been a little jig that was danced after that success.) I had a lining, my structural layer, and my outer nude satin layer that I planned on covering with mesh and lace for an illusion-top look. The only problem was I could just never get the breast cups right! I redid them four times; taking all my layers apart, adjusting, re-patterning, and nothing worked. To someone else, it probably wouldn’t be terrible, but I knew that just wasn’t how I wanted my wedding dress to fit. I decided to put the bodice on the back burner and began draping, patterning and sewing the mesh/lace layer of my dress just so I could at least keep making some sort of progress. One night, I was just goofing around after everyone went to bed and decided to try on the illusion mesh and lace top without the structured corset bodice underneath and discovered the fit was perfect. The illusion was just never quite right with the nude bodice underneath, but the lace directly on my skin was seamless and dreamy.

I pushed forth with my dress, lit with the fire of my discovery that was going to bring me closer to the vision of my finished dress. I put all the pieces of my dress together, received another small victory of putting in an invisible zipper on my first go, and tried on my very first and only wedding dress. My husband is the only person that I’ve ever gone on a date with and I felt this deep symbolism in the similarity that my wedding dress is the only one I’ve ever even tried on. I didn’t have a need to shop around and try different ones to know that this was the one for me. There’s a special purity, confidence, and consistency in these two decisions and I’m grateful for the Lord’s guidance and peace for both.

For me, a woman’s wedding dress is a beautiful symbol of her purity, her presence, and the way she is seen by the Lord. Though my experience making my dress was arduous, terrifying, gut wrenching, and at times defeating; I’m in tears writing this and thinking about how beautifully the process lined up with preparation for marriage in general. Getting to set time aside to work on my dress was about the only time I had alone during our wedding season to just process all of the changes that were about to take place. In hindsight, I really cherish the time I had to work on my dress, it became a meditative experience in which I got to see the Lord's heart and wisdom for something that we usually see as very earthly.

The eve of the wedding, I waited till everyone left from the rehearsal dinner before bringing out my dress to work on it one last time. I chit chatted with my aunt as I sewed on the last couple eye-hooks and finishing touches on my dress. I told her good night, put a loop on the back for a bustle, and enjoyed living in the comforting silence of my family's house one last time.

...

The next day I got to live out the vision I'd seen so many months prior.

Needless to say, he loved it!