Ah! Weddings. They can be huge, lavish, extravagant, or small intimate and understated depending on your personal tastes, style, and ultimately your budget. Be they in the summer, winter, spring, or fall, weddings are often the highlight of the entire year for all involved. The planning, preparation and forethought that go into them can take months or even years to accomplish before the big day finally arrives. Of course, the crowning moment of the wedding is that first sight of the bride all decked out in a beautiful white gown as she takes her first steps down the aisle toward her future husband. It is that moment alone that requires the most planning and forethought of all.
Choosing the wedding dress itself is one of the biggest decisions of the whole wedding planning process for most brides, second only to choosing her groom. Traditions abound during weddings and almost every family has at least one or two. In my family, the wedding dress itself is part of a tradition my mother started. You see that unlike the conventional process of buying a dress from some huge retailer that specializes in gowns we take great pride in making our dresses by hand. Now don’t laugh it’s true and they all looked pretty good if I don’t say so myself.
At least this was what I had always imagined I’d do if and when I got married. However, when the time came around I was somewhat unsure of my sewing skills despite the fact that my mother had taught me how to sew from the time I was young and I had already made a number of dresses of ordinary variety for myself in the past. Don’t get me wrong making your own wedding dress is a monumental task not to be taken on by the faint of heart!
My sudden doubt of my own ability was coupled with normal wedding jitters of wanting everything to be perfect and was made worse by the fact that I fell in love with a picture of a dress I saw in an advertisement. So, with that in mind I let a friend of mine convince me to look at dresses with her at a large Alfred Angelo boutique. Like most brides, I had a pretty good idea what I wanted and what I didn’t. It had to be white not cream, and it needed to have long sleeves and be a fairly full skirt that didn’t stick out like something out of the Gone with the Wind movie. With that in mind, we went shopping three months before the wedding. The experience was less than enjoyable for me. The well-meaning sales lady had a personality that bordered on pushy to downright rude. Despite that, I tried to be a good sport and tried on numerous dresses. Unfortunately, everything in my price range was sleeveless and very low-cut, two things I definitely did not want in a dress. Apparently, you have to pay more money to get sleeves and a top that doesn’t let everything hang out if you bend over. Even so, I continued to look for something similar to the dress I had seen in the ad.
But, alas, it was not to be mine as my budget severely restricted what I was able to afford. After my failed shopping trip, and several others like it I went back to the drawing board literally and decided to make my own dress as I had originally planned. It was a challenging and yet wonderful experience. I recommend it to anyone who has a talent for sewing. The dress I made was simple and yet elegant and had the long flowing sleeves I had wanted. I trimmed the waist, neckline, and cuffs of the sleeves with a silver braided accent that gave it just a hint of decoration.
I learned something from it all that sometimes it’s best to stick with tradition; after all, it must be a tradition for a reason. Also, the best part was that the dress was made uniquely for my figure and it was not a carbon copy a hundred other girls might be wearing that season. I didn’t have to endure fitting after fitting with some stranger poking me to make the dress look right on my body. It was made that way to begin with. In the end, I not only had a great story to tell but I had a beautiful dress of which I could be proud. Additionally, I had paid only a fraction of the cost for the materials and thread that I used when compared to the dress I had seen in the advertisement and no one could tell the difference.
