My wedding dress

Pattern: Colette Parfait, heavily modified (of course! :P)

Fabric: purple satin cotton.

Haberdasheries: a zipper.

A first: making a 1950s-ish dress. It won’t be the last! I really like this style. This wasn’t actually the first wedding dress I made – I also made a Regency style one for a friend in 2008.

I got married this month! :D And I made my own wedding dress. Here’s a summary of the process.

I’m not the kind of girl who dreamed of getting married since I was a child. I always wanted to be with someone, and from early on in our relationship I knew that if I wanted to marry anyone it’d be him, but just living together was fine with me as well. Nonetheless, it can be hard not to get sucked into what society thinks a wedding should be! So I found this quote really good to keep in mind:

“A wedding is a party, not a performance. If at the end of the day, you are married to the one you love, then everything went perfectly!”

Despite this, unfortunately I still got very nervous :/.

I never dreamed of getting married, and I also didn’t dream away at the thought of a big white dress. So I knew from early on in the planning process that I’d probably have to make my dress myself. But I did start by going to a bridal shop which had lots of coloured dresses on their website, with my mother and my mother in law. It was funny to try on the dresses, just a special thing that you can only really do for this one occasion, but there wasn’t any dress that I truly loved. In fact, I found that most wedding dresses and party dresses are made of cheap materials, not very neatly finished, and thus very much overpriced. I know that everything connected with weddings is automatically twice as expensive as it would normally be, but I wasn’t expecting these dresses that are so important to many people to be made of polyester… Unfortunately, as a seamstress, I couldn’t help noticing these things and found them disappointing.

After this, for a while I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted, mainly of what I didn’t want (polyester, white, strapless). I considered having a dress made, but one shop I looked into had a 20 week delivery period and charged over 800 euros! As it was already less than 20 weeks until our wedding it wasn’t even possible to have my dress made there, but also, if felt a bit silly to have this dress made by someone else while working on less important things myself. So I set out to find a nice fabric, which also proved difficult…

Then my mum and I went shopping once more and ran into a vintage style shop I’d never seen before. I tried on some swing style dresses there, and (partly because of the shop assistant who had some very good suggestions) finally knew that this was the style I wanted – swing style, just below the knee, with a petticoat! I felt so great in those dresses, and thought them really flattering, showing off my waist and the slimmest part of my legs.

(The evening before this revelation I found this collection of coloured wedding dresses online. I liked several of them – especially, yes, the 1950s style ones!)

I eventually bought purple satin cotton in bed shop. I’m used to sewing with bed linen, so this was not as strange to me as it may be to some people ;). The fabric was beautiful, finely woven and shiny, and available in a nice colour that was bright enough for me, but not garish. As I wrote here [link to Spring For Cotton post] I had a colour analysis done to find out which colours were most suitable for me. I initially considered a light pink wedding dress, but since intense colours suit me best, I chose purple with light pink accessories instead. (The colour is actually a lot less bright in real than it seems in the photos, but I love both versions of it!)

Then I still had to find a pattern… I considered a shelf bust, but decided on a sweetheart neckline instead. I came across the Colette Parfait pattern and ordered that. It was too summer dressy though, so I attached the straps to the top part of the bodice with a smooth line, as well as making several other modifications to the bodice to reduce the hanging boob effect I think it had :P, and to make it fit me better. I didn’t use the skirt parts of the pattern, but cut a full circle (in two halves, as I had to accommodate the zipper). I hemmed the skirt by hand, which went a lot more quickly than I expected!

I bought a black elastic belt with a bow at the vintage style shop, which goes with, and really spices up, almost any outfit. But I didn’t want any black in my wedding outfit, so I made a purple version of the belt. I felt it looked nicest with the bow at the back.

I definitely want to make the original version of this pattern some time! I love this striped one.

Photos by Happy Photographer.

Regency fichu

Pattern: Single thickness neckerchief (included in Past Patterns #031, 1796-1806 front closing gown)

Fabric: about 60 cm of printed cotton

Haberdasheries: none!

For the bicentennial of the battle of Waterloo, I made a new camp follower’s fichu. That is, I cut a triangle of fabric at home and hand hemmed it at the event, as a nice campfire activity.

I used the ‘Single thickness neckerchief’ pattern included in Past Patterns #031, which says to cut a triangle and then fold the top edge several times and pin it.

This is the kind of pattern which you should just follow without wondering what exactly you’re doing. When I read through it I really didn’t understand why I should make so many folds in it, and what would be the use of cutting such a large triangle in the first place if the folds were going to make it so much smaller again. But somehow this method works! The pin keeps the pleats neat at the back neck, whereas at the front, the extra fabric from the pleats makes it easier to tuck the ends into the gown and keep everything covered in a modest fashion. With the simple triangles I used to use as fichus, I always had to pin the ends to my dress, and they’d still move. This one stayed nicely in place.

Hehe, this looks like it’s going to be an origami frog!

Sleeping mask

Pattern: none, I improvised

Fabric: printed cotton, printed flannel, pastel silk

Haberdasheries: 25-30 cm elastic

As I wrote in my post about my ruffled blackout curtains, exposure to light at night can substantially lower your melatonin level, which lowers sleep quality, and can cause a variety of problems, from weight gain to depression. I’m not sure whether this only applies to light entering the eyes, or whether light falling on the skin has an effect as well, but I assume the former is the most important. So, as it isn’t always possible to have blackout curtains (for instance, when sleeping in a white bell tent during re-enactment events!), I made a sleeping mask.

It was based on my friend Neenkster’s project, which made me realise I might as well make one myself when I couldn’t find one quickly. I wanted to use a cheerful printed fabric, like Neenkster did, for the outside, and a soft silk for the inside. But those two thin layers didn’t seem quite opaque enough to me, so I added two additional layers of printed flannel which I had left from making my flannel pyjama trousers. I’d have preferred unprinted flannel, but I couldn’t find any in my stash and didn’t want to buy anything for this tiny and last-minute project! Anyway, the print doesn’t show through the other fabrics.

I sewed the layers together with the elastic in between, leaving a gap at the top for turning the mask outside out. Then I topstitched around the edge to close the gap and keep the layers in place
(which, on second thoughts, would have looked a lot neater if I had used light blue yarn on my bottom bobbin!).

Edwardian hat

Pattern: none

Fabric: mauve satin cotton from an Ikea Gäspa fitted sheet; light pink tulle

Haberdasheries: cherry blossoms

I started making this hat last year, for my second civilian World War I event at Huis Doorn. But I didn’t finish it, because I couldn’t find any decorations for it that matched the brown fabric. (I find hat decoration the hardest part of making historical outfits! There are several more hats that I haven’t posted here yet because I’m not yet happy about them. My 1915 hat turned out exceptionally well!) So I wore it undecorated, looking like this:

But most Edwardian hats were very lavish, so I didn’t want mine to remain minimalist! Also, the brown fabric was a bit too artificial, although it doesn’t show in the photo. So I decided to start over with new fabric, and just choose a nice colour rather than one that matched the straw base. I realised I should see the straw similarly to jeans: as a neutral that matches pretty much anything.

This was what the hat originally looked like:

I removed the ribbon and threaded metal wire through the rim to stop it being floppy, which was of course too modern:

I put some fibrefill around the crown of the hat, and sewed the fabric on over it, to create a wide crown:

And finally, I added tulle and lots of cherry blossoms:

From the side and top:

My inspiration for the flower arrangement, and also for the bow-like piece of fabric on the side of the hat (bottom row, second from right):