How to Make a Wedding Dress

A wedding is surely a special day for every woman in her life, and she would like everything from the wedding cake to the wedding dress to be just perfect. Wedding gowns are usually very expensive and most times women save money to buy their dream wedding gown. But if you are short on budget, making your wedding dress on your own would be a great idea. If you are planning to make a wedding dress for yourself, it is necessary for you have stitching skills. If you do not, start making some dresses for yourself, so that you understand the basics about stitching. Here are some tips on making of a wedding dress.

Steps to Make a Wedding Dress

• The first step towards making a wedding dress is the designing. You can look through different fashion and bridal magazines where you would find different wedding dress styles and designs. The Internet is also a good place to search for wedding gown designs. You can choose one from them or create your own design. But you need to look whether that pattern would look good on you, i.e whether it fits well with your body type. Ask for opinions from close friends and family, may be they can come up with ideas that would make the design of the wedding gown better.
• Once you are done with this, the next step would be to choose the fabric to make the wedding dress. Normally, the wedding dress is made of satin, but you can also make it with silk, cotton, tulle, taffeta, linen, etc. Other than this, the color of the wedding dress need not be restricted to white only, rather you can choose colors like light blue, pink, beige, ivory, gray, etc. Choose a color that would go well with your skin tone. Find out how much cloth would be required to sew a wedding gown and buy a little more than you would actually require so that you can make changes if something goes wrong during the sewing process.
• After this is done, you have to start with the measurements. As doing this on your own can be a little difficult and may lead to inaccurate measurements, it would be better to take the help of some other person like a friend or sibling to take your correct measurements. Once you are done with the measurements, you can start making your wedding dress. However, it is always recommended to try the pattern on a muslin (plain woven material) to understand how to go about making a wedding dress. It would also be a good idea, because if you make any mistake in this, you would surely avoid it while making the original bridal gown. You would even come to know whether the pattern really suits you.
• Cut the muslin cloth according to the pattern you have decided and sew the gown. Once you have done this, try it on. Most of the time it would be loose fitting and here comes the main job. With the help of pins, pin all the places to make the dress into a perfect fit. As this job cannot be done on your own, ask for the help of a friend to pin up the dress according to your fit. Remove the dress without taking off the pins and sew them together (hand stitch would do), and again try it on to know whether further alterations are needed.
• Now comes the most important and difficult step. You have to carefully draw the dress pattern with new measurement on to the paper for your actual gown. After this is done, transfer this design on the actual fabric. This requires lots of patience and should be done very carefully. Once you think that you have taken the measurement correctly, it is time to stitch it together. Try the gown once again and note down the final adjustments or alterations that you have to do.
• The next step would be to decorate the wedding dress. You must plan this at the same time of designing the dress. You can use frills, beads, sequins, pearls, etc., to make your wedding gown look beautiful and elegant.

The biggest advantage of making a wedding dress on your own is that it is less expensive as compared to buying one. However, if you are thinking of making your wedding gown, it would be good to start your work on the wedding dress 3 - 4 months before the wedding day. This would give you ample time to work on the gown and make changes if some problem arises. Last minute preparations would leave you with very less time and the end result would not be what you expected.

A last word of advice is to keep in mind the bridal jewelry and the wedding shoes that you have chosen or have in mind, while making your dress. You would surely enjoy the whole process and would cherish your wedding gown that you made with so much efforts, for a lifetime.