Making my wedding dress: the inspiration

Welcome to the first post in the making my wedding dress series, where I walk you through every detail of making my wedding dress! In this post, I will talk about the inspiration for the dress, and my overall vision for how I wanted it to turn out.

The Alena Leena Escallonia Dress

Before I had made up my mind to make my own dress, I was browsing Pinterest like any bride to be, pinning wedding dresses I loved to create a “vision board” for when I went dress shopping.

Making my own dress was something that had crossed my mind a few times, but I didn’t have much sewing experience, especially not with a garment so complicated and time-consuming. Plus, I know myself and that I am a huge procrastinator. I didn’t really want a big project that I would be working on until the day before the wedding (spoiler alert: I finished my dress four days before the wedding).

Then I fell in love with this dress, the Escallonia by Alena Leena. I loved the fitted bodice with the long flowing skirt, the low back, but most of all, the removable puff sleeves!! I thought about this dress pretty much constantly.

The only things stopping me from ordering this dress were:

  1. I live in a pretty small town in Montana, and there were not any stockists who kept a sample of this dress for me to try on.

  2. I haven’t looked up the price, but I can safely assume it is in the $2,000+ range. Safely WAY outside of this DIY-bride’s price range.

puff sleeve wedding dress from behind

An Idea was Born

That’s when the idea of making my wedding dress really solidified in my head. I was still nine months out from the wedding, and I started casually looking for dress patterns or tutorials on how I could possibly pull this off. I have no formal sewing training, just a lot of determination. After sitting on the idea for a few months, finding some sewing patterns that I thought might do the trick, and really building up my confidence, I decided to undertake the biggest sewing project I had done to date, and might possibly ever do in my life.

The Criteria

I love to make things complicated for myself, so I decided that the dress was going to be two-in-one. I loved the idea of having a separate dress for the reception, but I don’t like how many brides will pay thousands of dollars on a dress that they just wear for the ceremony, and then several hundreds more for a reception look. I wanted my dress to be multi-functional, and be able to transition from the ceremony to a reception look, but still look like the same dress.

My criteria for the dress were as follows:

  • Removable puff sleeves

  • a bodice that accentuated my bust

  • a slip skirt for the reception look

  • a detachable fairytale skirt for the ceremony

With all this in mind, I knew I had my work cut out for me. But I felt excited and motivated!

In the next post, we’ll go over the sewing patterns I chose and why. Thanks for following along!

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Making my wedding dress: choosing the patterns

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What is the Thread Rose?