What I did with my 1987 Wedding Dress!

Last weekend my boy Joe married his girl Caroline at Limbricht Castle in the Netherlands. Two years later than originally planned, it has been delayed twice and there has been other stuff to contend with too during the lockdowns. It was the most lovely day and our families were able to celebrate such a happy occasion in beautiful surroundings and glorious sunshine.

My daughter in law is dutch and because the UK has left the European Union, this also complicated matters and in the end, it was decided to hold a small registry office wedding here for the official paper work and the original planned celebration in the Netherlands a few weeks later. Both occasions were just wonderful and I wanted to include both these celebrations in a project I had been planning.

It is the first wedding in our family for a very long time and of course such an occasion prompts you to think about life and love and how the years pass by. I wanted to do something small and special with my needle for my new daughter in law and way back when the first wedding was planned in 2020 had made the decision to do something with my own wedding dress. I had a vague plan, but when Covid arrived to disrupt everything, I pushed the idea away for the time being. Even after Christmas, we still were not sure that the wedding would be able to go ahead and I rumbled ideas around in my head, but didn’t do anything. As things improved with the pandemic and it looked more and more promising that the wedding could go ahead, I got my dress out with about a month to go.

We got married in 1987. The dress has been bagged up in a cardboard box ever since, hauled around from move to move and generally been sitting quietly, lost in the mists of time. What to do with your wedding dress??? Does everybody feel like this? It’s such a key moment in your life, that it is hard to know what to do with such a special gown, and yet it isn’t really of any use to anyone from the day after your wedding. I think I may have looked at it a couple of times, mainly when we were moving house and then just popped it back in the box. Perhaps because it was our son’s wedding and emotions were full and high spirited, but when I opened up the box, the memories fluttered out like a rush of paper butterflies. Tiny things, big things, images of people long since gone, thoughts of the last 35 years, all swirling about in a short moment of nostalgia. I hung my dress up and sat back to think about what I could really do with it.

My wedding dress was very much of it’s time (as they all are of course) but it was also very much my style. Embroidery and a Victorian vibe make it pretty much what I would still pick to day if I was 24. The fabric is really very pretty with scalloped edging and trailing flowers winding their way around the silk. I still loved it to bits and I let it hang for a few days to enjoy it and the memories that went with it. At first I thought I would never be able to cut into it and almost abandoned the idea….but really….what was I ever going to do with it. I couldn’t bear the idea that one day, my kids would bag it up and dump it somewhere, because to be honest, what can you do with it? So …… I decided to make something that could be a legacy and here is how it went.

The first cut is the hardest, I am not going to lie. I tried a couple of times and then put my scissors down, made another cup of tea and wandered back into the sewing room. In some ridiculous way it felt like treachery. Then as my courage rose again, I told myself to stop being so nuts and just do it. I did and after that everything was fine. It was dismantled into a heap in just five minutes. There were some surprises. When it came to the netting petticoat, it was encircled in a ring of tiny blue bows with seed pearl beads, around the middle, which I cut off and set to one side. As I cut into the embroidered fabric it felt weaker and more delicate than I had hoped. It had some marks on it too. My plan was to make a pretty nightdress case for my daughter in law’s honeymoon and after that she could use it to keep maybe cards and messages from the wedding.

I decided to make the label first and used some Essex linen with a light metallic thread running through it. I printed out what I wanted to stitch, choosing a clear font and sizing it to something manageable and traced it on to the linen with my light box.

I used metallic silver thread and contrasting perle cotton thread for the embroidery and stitched the letters in simple tiny back stitches. I thought it looked really pretty when it was done and teamed it with some Anna Maria Horner roses fabric for the lining.

Having washed carefully the piece of the dress I had selected, I was ready to sew. I chose a bit with the scalloped edging to give a pretty finish to my project. It was just a simple envelope case, quickly stitched. I quilting the lining piece to give extra stability and added some woven iron on interfacing to the main body of the wedding dress fabric.

It was really very quick to make in the end and I am so thrilled with the result. I popped in a pretty nightdress as a little extra gift and when I saw it in the box, it felt like an enormously personal gift, just from me to my daughter in law. It is a great way to preserve and pass down something very special to me, but ready for new generations. I hope one day, maybe my grandchildren their children will add labels to this and it will become a record of our families wedding days.

I put two of the tiny blue bows inside for my daughter in law and she had them sewn into her wedding dress for their special day. I felt quite emotional when I saw this…a part of our day was carried forward and included in the beginning of the next chapter of our family story…

I have plenty of fabric and some little blue bows left for my other two kids, should they decide to get married and I have set aside a small piece of the embroidered fabric for myself. I don’t know what I shall do with it, but an idea will appear sooner or later. I feel that upcycling, recycling, remaking…. a much loved wedding dress, is such a great way to save a little bit of something magical, to weave its spell in the future to come.

See you next time, Ruby x