A Wedding Dress for Caeli: 2002
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Caeli and her future husband, Bucky.
They don't always look like this.
I've known Caeli since nursery school. She announced her engagement on Valentine's Day of 2002 and visited home (Massachusetts) in March. I had been thinking that it might be nice to make her dress as my wedding gift to her, but I didn't want her to feel obligated to take me up on that. Somehow it came out during her visit that it was something we both wanted to happen, so...
The Process:
Making the dress dummy...
I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to make her wedding dress without having her present for fittings. I visited her in May as part of a surprise for her birthday and brought with me a print-out of a website that gives instructions on making personal dress dummies. Many thanks to Jennifer Thompson for the link.
I decided to go with one made of duct tape, so that it would be flexible and could be folded into my suitcase without getting crushed on the trip home. Caeli put on a tank dress and I wrapped her up in tape out on the sidewalk on a sunny Columbus Sunday. Neighbors liked that.
I cut Caeli out of the shell, brought it home on the plane, stuffed it up and mounted it with a floor lamp as the stand. The only problem with the lamp was that it had a bendable head, which made it tip and slouch sometimes. I guess that just made it more realistic.
Making the mock-up dress...
Caeli had some images from bridal magazines of dresses that she liked, but I couldn't find any patterns that really came close to what she wanted. I bought one that had a full skirt and decided that I would start from there and make adjustments. I bought some inexpensive satin in order to start making a mock-up dress. The plan was to create a mock-up that I would then mail to Caeli for her to try on. She had a friend near her who sews, and who offered to be there to help pin and mark up the dress in problem areas. If it seemed that the dress needed changes, then it would be shipped back and forth until it was right. In the end, the pieces of the mock-up would end up as the pattern pieces used when cutting out the fabric for the final version.
I took the panels in below the hips and added width and length to make them flare and to give the skirt a train. I pinned the result together and took photos to put up on the web so that Caeli could see them and tell me if I was getting the basic shape of the skirt right. I had done no fitting at this point - I was only concerned with the flow of the skirt.
Pages: ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 4 ~ 5 ~ The Wedding ~