They say it’s unlucky to make your own wedding dress. They say the same about receiving knives as gifts, brides wearing pearls or getting married on a Saturday. So much of wedding culture is built on fear. But wearing my homemade wedding dress was a moment of courage.
I was underqualified to make it. I hadn’t sewn together a proper piece of clothing since my GCSE textiles classes. But I knew the basic concepts, I could read a pattern and I can be very stubborn. In the end, I decided to go ahead because I liked sewing and thought, if I took my time, I was probably capable of doing it.
To begin with, I was trepidatious. There would be weeks when I was paralysed with fear by the possibility of getting it wrong. One careless snip and an entire bodice needs reworking; get the measurements wrong and it’s back to square one; and make something that just looks bad and I’ve wasted my opportunity to wear the dress of a lifetime. Eventually, I had to have a word with myself: ‘Do it imperfectly or don’t do it at all.’
I spent nine months working on it. On the living room floor, I cut six metres of soft satin fabric, unrolling sections at a time, draping the remainder over the top of the sofa and crawling around on my hands and knees to follow the curves of the pattern.
I would post photos and ask for advice on sewing forums (and then quickly delete the posts out of self-preservation when users chastised me for attempting such a thing with so little experience). I couldn’t do the zip up to the top, so I would ask my husband-to-be to hold out his hands and keep his eyes closed, while I backed into him so he could pull up the zip – that was a superstition I playfully embraced.
One day, my cat scaled the dress, claws first, as it hung on a mannequin. Thankfully, that was on the trial version made of cotton, but the final design didn’t escape personalisation. On the right-hand side, a couple of inches below the neckline, there is a small red dot. A month before the wedding, when I was sliding a stitch ripper through a dart, I missed the seam and put the blade through the top layer of skin on my finger, causing it to bleed a little. Perhaps if the bloodstain were larger I would have been upset, but this late in the game, I embraced it as evidence of the journey I had been on to make it.
Every inch of that dress had been run through my fingers. Uneven seams happened when I had a lapse in concentration: straight stitches coming off course because the post had arrived, my phone was ringing or I was calling out my tea order through a closed door. The skirt was made of almost four metres of slippery, delicate fabric, so I hand-stitched the hem while sitting on the sofa, late into the night.
When it was completed, two weeks before the wedding, the dress stood behind my desk on a mannequin, hidden under a double bed-sheet. To the trained eye, it was littered with mistakes. But I forced mine to see the bigger picture.
We often talk about how finding your wedding dress is like finding your soulmate – “the one” is out there, somewhere, waiting for you to try it on by chance and fall in love. Making my own wedding dress taught me that there is more to love than just fate. The process of creating beauty, love and meaning, piece by piece, stitch by stitch, but with purpose and vision was incredibly rewarding. In my homemade dress, I walked down the aisle fearlessly.
But I felt vulnerable, too. Sewn into that dress were all my positive qualities: my vision, determination and resourcefulness. But it also held my flaws: impulsivity, stubbornness and a self-critical nature. Choosing to wear it was a lesson on the transformative value of embodying your entire, true self.
After months of doing up the zip with his eyes closed, my husband adored the dress when he finally saw it, as did the friends and family members who had encouraged me throughout the process. Seeing it through others’ eyes affirmed the things I had begun to feel myself. I felt proud and honest.
Five minutes after sitting down for lunch, I spilt red wine down the front of the dress. The stain won’t come out but I don’t mind. It was another marker of a joyous day and a final reminder to accept and celebrate that life isn’t always perfect.