The Impatient Sewist

Always one to potentially bite off more than I can chew, I got it in my head to make my the dresses for my bridesmaids as well as my own. Beyond the wedding day itself, being engaged has felt like a wonderful celebration of the people around you, and making these dresses seemed like a fun project to work on together.

Making the bridesmaid dresses also presented some advantages, namely how easy the colour-coordination will be! The challenge, but also the opportunity, is to develop my fitting skills for bodies that aren’t my own. I usually draft my own patterns and there the challenge is to translate a design idea into a flat pattern. Here, I’m starting with a pre-designed pattern, but I’ll need to adjust it, and potentially do a adjustments I don’t usually do for myself.

Early input from the girls was key. In our initial 3-hour zoom call about the dresses, everyone was quite honest about the styles they did and did not like. And choosing a dress style that they already liked to wear was bound to make the fitting process easier.

We decided on the Calliope dress by Gunnar Deatherage. I was honestly so surprised that we settled on one design and was fully prepared to do up to 2 dress types – but this dress stole our hearts. It has elegance, drama, and the gathered skirt required very little fitting.

Fabric Shopping

Oh boy. This was a fun day. I love fabric shopping anyway but doing it with a group of your best friends is incredible. Also, one of my bridesmaids brought her fancy camera and took photos of the process during the day! (This also unfortunately did mean she’s not in these pictures so let it be known, she’s amazing!!)

We started with a vague idea of what we wanted – blues or greens, and potentially a patterned fabric. One of the phrases that kept coming up is that we didn’t want the dresses to be too “bridesmaidy”. They are going to be unique pieces that I hope each of them will be able to wear beyond my wedding day.

We started our fabric shopping at Fabrics Galore, my local fabric shop. I realised that shopping for summer dress fabric in November is a bit tricky because in the UK that’s when the wools and coat fabrics come out… but we did find two patterened blue viscose options. These fabrics opened our eyes to the idea of a patterned fabric and that it could really work. I also brought a sample of my dress’ lace, because it all has to work coherently.

We then took a train over to Goldhawk Road, the fabric shopping dream street. I’d been once before but it still suprises me just how many fabric shops there are. We visited quite a few and our favourites were Classic Textiles and Dazzle. At CT there was a big selection of high quality patterned cotton fabrics, and we must have spent at least 40 minutes going through them, pairing them with different colours, assessing how they would look on everyone… I appreciated being able to just spend time with the fabric. Looking at so many patterns at the same time can be overwhelming, and it takes your eye a little while to take it in. There were two fabrics as our top green contenders:

At this stage we’d only seen one shop and we visited several others to see if anything could beat the greens. At Dazzle, we found a solid satin which was also fantastic. A soft, light green to complement the patterned fabric.

As we shopped, it was very useful to get little sample of fabrics we liked. We used the satin sample and brought it back to the first shop, and it complemented perfectly. So the decision was made:

• Two bridesmaids in the green patterned fabric (the one on the left), for those who didn’t want the sleeves
• Two bridesmaids in the solid satin with a green tulle for the dramatic sleeves!

Toile Time

The next step will be doing toiles & fittings for everyone. I used a cheap polyester satin for the first toiles, which is not the nicest fabric to work with but it gives me good practise working with slinky fabric. I’m also using an old family Singer sewing machine, and while working on my toile assembly line I’m getting to know that machine better too!

So until next time… Let’s see if I’m still feeling as optimistic….