Wednesday 28 May 2014

Faffing with lace

The basic shell of my dress had now taken shape:

I'm pretty happy with the fit around the back.  You can see it ever so slightly sits away from the bust but I cannot remember if this is before the zip and lining are in.  Because my fiance is old fashioned and didn't think he should see the dress before the big day, I had to do all the photos myself, so apologies for the awful selfies!

Speaking of zips, unless you are some kind of wizard, just do it by hand! I marked my silk more than once trying to get it right.  I spent a long time browsing the internet for the perfect silk for the dress, but ended up with a simple ivory from John Lewis while looking for a lining.  I think it was something like £25 a metre.


I hand picked the zip along each edge.  To avoid showing the needle marks in the silk, I had just enough ease to hide them inside the seam allowances.  Phew!

My advice would be to sew the zip securely with short machine stitches to the lining (if the lining was substantial like mine) then hand pick the silk to it.  Because my shell was stitched invisibly to the lining along the seams, it was stable enough to get away with.  By the way, I didn't find this technique anywhere - it was just trial and error that the bodice looked better when the silk was anchored to the boning and lots of error with bad zip applications.

Anyway, this post was meant to be about lace! I used Platinum Bridal Fabrics after a fairly frustrating internet search where the variety and apparent quality were not very good.  They send A4 size swatches free of charge (up to a point I seem to remember).  Highly recommended!

I had a fair few ivory samples sent out and like about three enough to make the shortlist; then I draped them all over the dress to see what I liked:


See how big the swatches are! Sadly, none of the laces had quite enough drape to pull off the back drape that I originally planned:

I guess the borders were a little too chunky?

Anyway, I finally decided the best option would be for the front to remain crossed over the straps at the front and end in a V down the back.  So that's what I did!

Here's how it ended up:



 It's ALL handstitched with stitches than caught just one piece of the lace.  So I had to put in a stitch maybe every 2cm?

After doing the cross on the bodice, front and back, I had a fair bit of lace left.  So I carried it on down the side with the zip to disguise it a little.



The whole thing is somewhat random; I just pieced the lace motifs with small gaps between so they ended somewhere between waist and hip around the dress.  It took me probably about ten hours?  But in fact it was the last bit, so it felt OK to push on, and it was already about two months before the wedding :)

Next time - a word on the details and interior structures, and a step by step of how I went about the whole process (as in fact I have skipped all over the place and neglected to make this very informative...)

TA RA







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