Among all my other projects, I’ve been working on Polly’s wedding dress, but I couldn’t blog about it because it needed to be a secret until her wedding. Now that Polly’s all happily married to Mr Polly, and had the loveliest wedding (with swing dancing!) I can show you her gorgeous dress.  Yay! Polly’s dress was such a fun commission to work on. I love non-traditional brides, and Polly had such a charming, individual, perfectly her vision for her entire wedding.  Polly is a seamstress in her own right, and loves vintage textiles. The invitations included pattern pieces (cute!), and she made her bouquet and the bridesmaids bouquets out of tea dyed silk flowers, vintage buttons, and old doilies and pieces of antique lace, including some from her mothers wedding dress.  Awwwww…. Lucky for Polly, one of her best friends and bridesmaids was noted Wellington hat designer Amy Jansen-Leen, and Amy did Polly’s hair and headpiece, and collaborated with Polly and I on the dress design. Polly picked the most gorgeous fabrics for her dress, …

Reading my blog for the last few weeks, you might have been mistaken for thinking that I was purely a historian, and never sewed at all.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  In reality, I have done little else but sew for the last few weeks, and have been too busy with it to blog about it! One of the main things I have been working on is Carolyn’s dress, the art-deco inspired extravaganza.  It’s looking amazing, if I do say so myself (also, Mr D and the bride and a few other people who have seen me sewing it have said so, so I know it is true) 😉 I’m so excited that it is finally all together and looks like a real dress.  There are so many different pieces to it that it took a long time to come together and feel like a garment. It still needs lots of finishing touches: beads and sequins and corset backs and linings and a dozen tiny finishing bits. Sadly for you though, I won’t …

Carolyn’s dress is very, very close to done, and over the last week I’ve been working through the last of the design issues. First, what to do with the detailing above the bust? I had the ‘brilliant’  (well, it could have been brilliant, you never know until you try with this stuff!) idea to layer different silver fabrics and then add a bit of beads and sparkle on top of it. I looked through my stash of translucent silver fabrics (and yes, it is a bit scary that I have a whole stash of translucent silver fabrics) and found these: I liked the way the two fabrics layered over each other, the foiling just showing through the organza: So I patterned up the bodice detailing, cut it out, sewed it together, and carefully pressed it. Then I pinned it to the dress and had a look at it. Blech! I bet that Snow White’s evil stepmother had bodice detailing just like that on her wedding dress!  It definitely has an evil-queen batwing aesthetic about it. …