A Not Wedding Wedding Dress

At long last, it’s the project you’ve been waiting for (or hopefully waiting for) because there hasn’t been a real project in ages.

This was going to be a much longer post. Much, much longer.

However, as my many lovely pictures were taking their once in a life time pilgrimage from my phone to my laptop, they got waylaid and ejected into a black hole. No one has seen them since.

That’s right, all of my time and effort to take good wonderful photos, gone.

Nevertheless, I still have some good grand reveal and the all important before pictures.

So now, the intro that would have preceded the post had not tragedy played it’s cruel hand.

Recently I’ve been thinking about being married a lot. Well not necessarily being married but having a wedding. I don’t want anything grand or fancy or huge just something small and simple. And I’m sure I haven’t put as much thought and planning into my future wedding as some have. Despite that, I was consumed with what can only be called wedding fever.

It’s always been a goal of mine to make my own wedding dress. Pretty much ever since I learned how to sew I knew it was something I wanted to do to make that day all the more special.

** I should add a disclaimer here: I am not getting married, engaged, dating, or courting anyone at the moment, this was just a daydream I wanted to pursue **

Since wedding dresses are kind of a big deal I decided there could be no harm in a practice attempt made out of some old curtains my grandma gave me and some scraps of lace. And so with undeterred determination and a false sense of purpose, I set out to do just that.

Now, you’ll notice I mentioned curtains. You’ll also notice the words “that my grandma gave me.” This may give you the idea that the material I was working with was very, very old, and very dirty. I will let you interpret that however you desire.

Notice the two layers of fabric that they’re composed of.

Since the curtains were some of the grossest material I’d ever had the misfortune to decide to work with, I ripped out all the seams and threw them in the wash for a good long time.

Then they came out like this and I was fairly certain I’d ruined them because they were so old and I thought they might have just shredded.

Amazingly, they were just a little frayed and tangled which a quick cycle in the dryer mostly solved. It also sort of made it worse.

Then I snapped on my fingers and……………..

If only had been that easy…

The final project turned out nothing like the original design sketch that I made.

At least I had enough forethought to try and design it before just cutting up my fabric with little to no vision.

Likewise, the “engagement ring” pictures didn’t turn out very well. It turns out it takes quite a bit of coordination to take a picture of you left hand as though someone else is being the photographer.

I just had a really fun time with this dress because it turned out way better than I could have ever imagined it would have. There are some things that, if it were actually going to be the dress I wore on my wedding day, I would want to change.

Wearing a fake engagement ring also gave me a great practical joke to play on a few of my friends. I even got one person to fully believe I was getting married and ask when the wedding date was.