Come Together (The Dress That Is)
This is my (second) last post about my wedding dress, & the last about the construction as I’m sure you’re all sick of reading about it. This is the bit where I put all the pieces together. But before I did I made one last component, the sash. I haven’t spoken about it because it’s pretty straight-foward & not very interesting.
The first thing I did was sewn the lace coat onto the corset. This was a surprising simple task. I put the corset & lace coat on. Mum pinned the lace coat in place in the area where I was going to stitch it down & then I ran a single machine stitch around the whole thing, (yet another reason why sewable boning is one of the best inventions ever, otherwise I would have been hand-stitching).
The next task was to attach the skirt. This was a surprising difficult task. Again I put the corset & lace coat on. Mum pinned the skirt to the corset, matching the seams in the corset with those in the skirt. This time I ran a double row of stitches around the waist – you forget how much 10m of silk weighs… But due to the mammoth skirt this took over an hour. We put down a whole heap of clean cotton sheeting to protect the dress’ ‘whiteness’ & my mum stood there slowly moving the fabric around to allow me to slowly stitch the two together. On top of that we were sewing through A LOT of material (silk, interfacing, boning, silk, lace, gathered silk, gathered lining). It was quite a struggle when I got to the seams! But we got there. I think my expression in the photo above pretty much sums up my feelings about it.
The last thing to do was to attach the sash. Mum & I actually decided that the best way to do this would be to lightly tack it in place to cover the skirt-corset seam. We also thought it would be best to do it on the day as we were getting ready, (I think this was partly due to our arguments about where the sash should sit on my waist – I tended to prefer it higher & Mum, lower).
These pictures show the first time the dress has been sewn together. You can see that it’s still missing a few buttons (it was easier to sew everything together without them) & that the sleeves still need trimming around the embroidery. The sash is just sitting there & hasn’t been sewn on.
In my next post I’ll put up some of my favourite shots of the dress from the professional photographer.
