I’ve known I wanted to make my own wedding dress for a long, long time, but when it came time to start working on it I felt a lot more unsure of the design than I expected to. I had a lot of ideas, but picking the very best ideas for The Dress is a lot of pressure! Two things I knew for sure right from the start were that the dress would be blue, and that it would have an open back.
My original sketch had a deep open back, high neck in front, and long sleeves, with an a-line skirt in likely 8+ layers of various light fabrics, florals all over, and some kind of non-white blue or blush coloring. I had a really strong vision for the back of the dress, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the front or sleeves fit into the design well.
My initial sketch* - I never sketched the front of this version because I simply could not picture it!
My favorite dress from the bridal salon
After getting a bit stuck in the sketching stage, I went with a couple of friends to a local bridal salon for inspiration and research. The experience was super illuminating, because it turned out that a lot of what I thought I wanted didn’t work at all when I tried on real dresses. The dresses I liked the most were a-line (not surprising) with spaghetti straps and a deep-v in front (shocking!). I even found one dress by Leanne Marshall that was the exact dove grey-blue I had been picturing, that I fell madly in love with and nearly psyched myself into buying. Obviously I didn’t buy that dress, but I took a lot of notes on what I loved about it (i.e. the cut of the neckline, the color, and the way the skirt flowed like water) to incorporate that into my next sketch.
My second set of sketches involved a similar neckline to the Leanne Marshall dress, and not totally dissimilar to the final neckline of my dress, though at this point I was imagining a slightly curved neckline and hadn’t yet decided to add a mesh insert for structure in the deep V. The skirt had three tiers, with the top layer picked up with little tacks to create movement. A lot of this sketch made it into the final design, but the pick-ups did not!
Getting closer, but still playing with skirt ideas. No idea why I colored it this dark!
The final design I settled on had a double deep-v neckline supported by a mesh insert, a low back in the middle, and a higher cut on the side of the back, to provide more support on the bust. I simplified the skirt to 3 layers of circle skirts of various shades of blue and with the lengths slightly varied at the hem, with a long train in back. This silhouette was cleaner and the varied colors would give me the flowing-water effect I was going for. By this time I had already bought some beautiful floral lace, and I included it in the sketch here along the back hemline.
The final sketch
Next up I’ll talk about the process of turing the sketch into a pattern!
*I use My Body Model for all my sketches, it’s a fashion template made to your individual measurements and it’s so helpful for visualizing what a design might look like on you, not a 7-foot tall Barbie. I highly recommend for anyone interested in building their own wardrobe! (Sadly it is currently only available for feminine body shapes)