Wedding Dress Finished!

The dress is done! 200 fabric leaves, 12 yards of crepe and 7 yards of silk gauze. 

The leaves fluttered as she moved.

Many hours were spent carefully snipping leaves out of the die cutter and sewing them on the dress. Sewing the leaves on took about 3 12 hour days, much longer than I'd anticipated. Most of them were machined, but the ones on the bodice shear I had to do by hand as I couldn't risk the machine snagging the lightweight gauze. Most of the time it was fine, but every now and then it'd give me a heart attack. 

Here's the back.

The dress is on my dress form Betty, which is a bit small for this dress. I've a tiny band of piping in the shear neckline, put in with hand rolled hem. It's lace weight crochet thread, which tied in the back in a delicate bow. It made the neckline rock solid, which I was really worried about given the lightness of the silk gauze.

The skirt was cut on the straight. There is 5 yards of each fabric in the skirt (10 total). Each panel had 25 leaves sewn around the hem, with more added once the dress was added to fill it in a bit more toward the waist. I gathered the skirt to the bodice, subtling pushing some of the fullness to the back, but not a huge amount. This is the skirt laid out on my living room floor so I could cut the top to length.

Here's how the crepe leaves looked against the silk gauze, from an in-progress shot. I found the best way to orient them was to let them fall naturally, rather than force it. I'd pick a general area and drop it from about a foot, then pin it where it fell.

Complicating this dress was that my sister is pregnant, 15 weeks at her wedding (yay!!). Just far along enough to have changed bust sizes and starting to look pregnant, but not far enough along where emphasizing the pregnancy can be a design point. This made determining a style really difficult, and is why the waistline is a little high in the front. I made 30 design sketches before we decided on this one.

Once we decided on a style, I used this Burda pattern a a basis for the line of the dress. I liked the simplicity of the bodice cut, and that I wouldn't have to figure out the sleeves and armscye.