Sewing for a Wedding

Even before I finished these I was asked to make a bridesmaid dress. I had by this time got burnt out with custom sewing... not a good start for a difficult project :P. But I agreed to do it.


I helped the lady pick out fabrics from Joann's and helped her design the dress... Mom did a lot of this, too. But before I actually began sewing, I did these;





I added straps to the wedding dress,




I hemmed this dress that one of the ladies attending the wedding wore.



And I altered the flower girl's dress, making it smaller in the bodice.


Getting around to the bridesmaid dress was hard!!! But I had a deadline. It was the beginning of August. I had till August 31.

I started with cutting it all out... with help from Mom. The fabric was difficult to cut out, and we kept having to trim and re-trim it. I did some of the small sewing, then started with the embroidery - my mom drew the design.




She penciled it on one half, then I traced over that with a gel pen so it showed up, and traced it on the other half. Since the embroidery and beading were on a sheer overlay, doing them was half way easy, since all I had to do was pin the pattern to the back side of t he sheer, and embroider/bead over that.









The embroidery took three and a half full days (mom let me off all work so I could do nothing but embroider), and the beading another day. At first I used a tool to heat up the beads on the bodice, but the batteries were dead before I was 1/4 of the way done, so the lady I was making this for bought glue for me to just glue on stick the beads on (this ended up being a faster way anyways). The only thing was when sewing it all together the beads scraped off and I had to glue them back on.








My sewing mess - before it got very bad. The wedding was cancelled (because the bride had surgery and was sick) while I was doing the embroidery. This gave me more time. But I didn't find out the new date until ten days beforehand - October 18.

The whole dress is lined. The belt is lined so no seams show. On the inside of the slip/lining I sewed tulle, so the dress skirt puffs out. At first the dress was going to have gathers at the waist, but the lady decided this didn't look good, so we re-cut out the skirts to an a-line.

At first we were going to do the belt grey with lace trim on top, but decided it would look better being overlayed with black sheer.

One other thing worth mentioning is that she wanted the scallop on the lace used for the edge of the skirt, but since the skirt was cut out at an a-line, the scallop couldn't be left on. So we cut it out, planning to glue it on with fabric glue. Problem was the glue showed...so I ended up cutting off the scallop. Before cutting off the scallop, I tried peeling off the glue, even putting it in hot water to melt it off. All this did was shrink the lace skirt. But I was able to find as lace scallop online that matched the skirt and made up for what had been shrunk. This lace was ruffled onto the skirt.

Oh, I finished the dress in this picture, then had her try it on. But the invisible zipper burst open (they don't make good zippers anymore!) so I had to take it out and put in a regular dress zipper... which meant another day's work, as I had to take out some hand stitching, put a new zipper in, and slipstitch the lining back in place.



By the way, the dress is sparkly grey satin. The skirt is overlayed with black lace, the belt, sleeves, and bodice with black sheer, and the belt has black trim sewn on the center.

We were invited to the wedding!!! It was really fun... we were almost the only non-Mexicans present. The pastor who performed the wedding was white, so there was another man that translated it in Spanish for everyone else. It was great seeing my project being used - and not having to work on it!