As soon as Robbert and I started talking about marriage, I knew I wanted to try to make my own wedding dress. Today I wanted to talk a bit about what my plans are. Let’s start with the big question: why?
The Cost
For many brides, their dress is one of the most important parts of the wedding, and something they’re happy to spend a significant portion of the budget on. Five years ago I would’ve been one of them, but not anymore. It seems wasteful to me now to spend thousands on a dress that’ll only be worn for one day.
I do, however, want my dress to be breathtakingly gorgeous and super special. There’s a reason wedding dresses are so expensive: a lot of time and luxury material goes into making them look like the most amazing dress you’ll ever wear. Less expensive dresses have to compromise on something, and they usually don’t match what I have in mind for my own wedding dress.
Making the dress myself will leave me with only the material costs, cutting out the price for pattern making, labour and expertise. Those things are useful beyond a doubt, but I’m crossing all my fingers and toes hoping I can get it done myself to a satisfactory result :) I’ll no doubt spend much longer making this dress than a professional seamstress would, but it’ll be a labour of love and make actually getting to wear the dress all the more satisfying.
The Personalisation
Making my own dress will allow me to customise every single detail. I can make and re-make any element of the dress to my heart’s desire, spend hours fitting and hand-sewing the right piece of lace to the right part of the dress, and if I were to change sizes between now and then, I’ll be able to take that into account right away.
Commissioning a custom dress from a dressmaker wouldn’t allow for such fickleness, and even though I might not change my mind 20 times throughout the process, it’s nice to know that I can.
The Fun
Honestly, my biggest reason for deciding to make my own dress is that I really want to. I think it’ll be so much fun, and the idea makes me incredibly excited. For someone who loves to sew, getting to make your own wedding dress is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I wouldn’t want to miss out on.
I can only imagine how proud I’ll feel when I get to walk down the isle in a beautiful dress I completely made myself. I can’t wait to spend my evenings labouring away at this piece, especially since most of the wedding planning is already done with more than half a year to go. This will make the wedding prep much more present throughout all of the upcoming months and I can’t wait.
My Inspiration
Given that I’m still in the early stages of this dress-making adventure, I can’t tell you too much about my plans at this point. Not all the details are clear to me yet, and I want to remain flexible in case I change my mind on anything. I do however have a rough silhouette in mind, and a few elements I’m pretty sure I’d like to feature. A deeper V-neck, skirt with a train and full, bellowing sleeves are some of them.
Below are some snippets of my inspiration photos, so you can get an idea of roughly what silhouette, materials and vibe I’m going for. There are a couple of existing dresses that are incredibly close to what I’d like to make, but I’m not going to share those yet, of course :)
I can’t wait to get started! I plan to capture the whole process on camera, and upload a “making the wedding dress” video after the wedding. Weeeeee!
If you like to take a look Mona Grudt, earlier Miss Universe has her own youtube wedding channel and wedding magazine. I watched some for the dresses and it is much to learn around wedding dresses. Maybe in her magazines you find something for create a dress. Burda is also a sewing magazine.
I‘ve been thinking about making my own wedding dress, too. This idea is sooooo gorgeous! Your inspiration looks a bit like SweetEmelyne‘s (from YT) wedding dress 😍 I adore her channel. And yours! PLEASE take us on your journey on YT! I can‘t wait to see you make your wedding dress. It‘s a dream come true! 😍
My granny sewed until she was 95 and my mom learnt from her. I knew what I wanted so was thrilled that my mom and my granny made my dress for me! It was (is!) so beautiful and was my style and not that year‘s trend…
Mostly, the wedding dress scene is a con. My eldest daughter bought a mid-range dress (= €1500) while my second daughter ordered from China (= €160). When I had the dresses cleaned, the first one turned out to be made in Vietnam, probably for the same price as the second one. Both were very well made.
With the first dress, you tried on a sample, it was ordered – as we later realised, in a standard size. The fitting was for a local seamstress to make alterations, no wonder it cost so much with all those overheads 😳
The second dress was made to measure and fit perfectly bar a tiny tuck on the shoulders we could do easily.
Lesson learned!! It‘s wonderful that you‘re making your dress. I treasure mine…
I’m so excited to see what you make! Your inspiration pics are soo lovely. We’re getting married this weekend and I can tell you I spent a shocking amount on my dress, but the upside to Covid is that now I will get to wear it twice since we will have a (very) small legal ceremony and then some kind of celebration with friends when we’re able to do that safely.
I also did not want to spend a fortune, so I bought a second hand ( wedding salon was closing so really more outlet) dress. It cost around 100 euros including shipping and was all silk. I later learned, that this brand even sells to the british royal family 😁 So I wish you to be as lucky with the sewing as I was with my purchase.
I’d be super awesome to have the “skirt” part of the dress be two-layered (one long that goes over, is detachable and looks swoon-y in photos and one shorter that acts as a lovely petticoat/ party¬ getting the bottom ruined in the forest).