Lessons learned from sewing dresses for bridesmaids
Oh dresses. I do love a dress. I will happily wear a dress every single day of the week (and in fact, I am wearing two dresses as I type this, for I am also rather in love with layering and quite unsure as to what has happened to our summer weather in recent days) so today I have not one but multiple posts about dresses for weddings. Starting with my bridesmaids.
When I started, I had dreams beyond my league for the handmade creations I would sew for each of my three bridesmaids. The plan was for each girl to have a dress that was unique to her, but all made from the same fabric. All started well: something classic and feminine for Abbie, our maid of honour, something youthful but sophisticated for Cassie and something with a twinge of late eighties rock for Beks. All cut from a dusty blue starchy silk found on Berwick Street.
But it turns out that making dresses for other people is entirely different to making dresses for yourself. When I sew for myself, I just try it on before I sew each seam. By the time the dress is done, I’ve tried it on more times that I’ve actually worn some items in my wardrobe! And when you sew for someone else, it’s significantly more troublesome to get that exact fitting part right. Sadly, sewing with silk means you need to get the fit a great deal more exact than something like… jersey.
We were going fine until about a fortnight before the wedding when I made a huge mistake that just wasn’t something I could fix. And I didn’t think I had time to do the finishing touches on the other dresses and also pretty much make that one again from scratch.
Enter plan B.
Through sheer coincidence, the dresses were all quite similar from the waist down. I quite literally sat on the sofa with a seam ripper and took the tops off all three dresses. All the stitching and paneling and details of the tops were tossed to the side and I ended up with three blue skirts and their three white petticoats and one night of horrible dreams in which my three bridesmaids wore ratty old t-shirts down the aisle.
I promise she didn’t wear jeans during the ceremony. But somehow she still makes it look cute.
But everything was salvageable as skirts (aside from the fact that I made one at least a full size too big and she was so polite that she just coped and carried on, bless her) and I headed to Oxford Street to find three tops that would work, now that I had overcome the barrier of ‘it’s a bridesmaid’s dress – it shouldn’t be a skirt and top‘. Oh, and then I had to get over any worries about the girls wearing black at a wedding, because I found black formal tops at Coast, a sort of corset style with lots of layers of ruched fabric. A bit like this in their current collection, but sleeveless. I was in the store for ages as I worked out with a measuring tape and a patient sales assistant. I called Abbie and she actually went to a store near her to try the same top on. I remember having real discussions with the shop girl like ‘why are you still waiting?’ ‘oh, someone is driving to another store to try it on and see what will work’… but I think I must have been too nervous to leave the store without the tops in hand, so I stayed there for quite some time. Anyway, I left with four tops for three girls, as one of them I thought was going to be in between sizes and I figured whichever one didn’t fit I could return.
Meanwhile, my grandmother sat in my flat and fixed my wobbly hems, and said nice things like It’s only because I’ve been sewing for forty years more than you when I was about to break down at some of my mistakes. (Silk is not exactly the most forgiving of fabrics, but mostly I was just on emotional breakdown from having Ruined An Entire Dress. Sigh.) Her help was fantabulous.
So on the day… petticoats (which I made quite early so they were hanging there for ages waiting for something to dress them up appropriately!), blue skirts and black tops, plus black beaded bracelets with one big rose, and blue-grey t-strap shoes from Aldo for the ceremony and blue Converse All-Stars for dancing, which happened to have a lovely print with handwritten words about love and friendship and other such sweet things.
If you fancy making skirts and petticoats, this tutorial is pretty much how I made the petticoats (and I stitched ribbon around the bottom edge for my maid of honour) and this is the process for a flared circle skirt. You don’t need a pattern for either.
And after all that sewing for nothing and the breakdown and the stress, I actually loved how these all worked out in the end.
xlovesx
PS: I never returned the fourth black top. The extra one fit me, so I kept it thinking it would be such a good go-to piece for occasions that called for dressing up. The first time I wore it, I spent the entire evening feeling like I needed to apologise to these three lovelies, since none of them ever mentioned how wholly uncomfortable it was. Bless them.
Photos in this post – with the exception of the first two – were all taken by Ben Roberts who now shoots weddings with Jay and Ben photography.
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