I don’t think I’ve ever put it into words before, but I think one of my philosophies in life is, “if you can’t afford to buy it, then make it yourself.”  Two things lead to my decision to make my own wedding dress.  1. our low low wedding budget, and 2. my extreme pickiness due to my exposure to high fashion dresses at work.  I was definitely taking a risk by making my own dress, though.  When I told my friend, who is a fashion designer, about my idea, he advised me against it.  He had made a dress for his wife for their wedding and warned me that it would be way too stressful.

There was a moment early on in the process, after totally botching my first attempt at making the bodice, where I regretted my choice and felt a sense of panic that I had wasted too much of the budget on fabric to buy anything worthwhile at that point.  Luckily after a day of mourning and not looking at my sewing machine, I learned from my mistakes, created a new plan, and started all over again.  After more than two months of using all my free time to hunch over my sewing machine, I brought the finished dress to work for a professional hemming.

Now the hem is done and I’m very pleased to say that I have a finished wedding dress that I’m very happy with!!  Of course its not quite to the standards of a professionally made gown….some stitching is uneven and obviously sewn by amateur hands, but overall, it looks like what I had in my head.  Unfortunately I can’t post pictures because I want to preserve that moment moment at the alter where Joe sees me in my dress for the first time.  But here are a few ambiguous looking process shots that I don’t think give too much away.

this collage gives away nothing about the final look of the dress, and is mostly under structers and early draping. Unforuntely I got pretty lazy about documenting the process since it was a pretty frustrating process at times. So you'll have to forgive the quality and lack of pictures.