Abi's 1960s Inspired DIY Wedding Dress

Hello! It's Abi here, and today on the TATB blog I'm going to share all the gory details of sewing my own vintage-inspired wedding dress - big yikes! If you've stumbled across this blog post because maybe you're about to embark on sewing your own (congrats!), let me reassure you it can be as stress-free as you desire and it doesn't have to require several months of planning and fittings - if you don't want it to. 

A quick selfie before we headed off!

Before we get into it, I would like to preface this post by letting you how casual I was about the whole getting married malarky (we've been together 10 years already). There wasn't toile after toile of my wedding dress, no studying couture hand sewing techniques, no endless fabric swatches and fitting tweaks. If anything, my friends and family will tell you I was too laid back about making my wedding dress, they were sending me text messages every other day to see if I had started it yet (sorry pals). I was so laid back, in fact, I made my dress one week before our wedding day.

So this blog post is my handmade wedding dress story, as chaotic as it may read...

Friends take the best photos - thank you Jacob for this one!

I won't bore you with the details, but let me tell you it was a proper pandemic wedding. We originally planned to elope, but to cut a long story short, we binned the idea and on our third attempt decided to get married at the small registry office at the end of our road with a handful of our closest friends with barely a month's notice. 

Five Tips For Making Your Wedding Dress

Bride + dressmaker: Allie
Photographer: Meg Runion Studios

Wedding season is upon us, and this year (at the time writing) is a particularly exciting one as there's a certain royal wedding coming up! We are eagerly anticipating Meghan’s outfit, with the press a-buzz with predictions.

The wedding dress is such an important part of the big day, and the right dress can make a bride feel truly special. As a sewist, have you ever considered making your wedding dress?

Bride + dressmaker: Jasmine
Photographer: Claudine Rosendale

I’m Jasmine, an intern at Tilly and the Buttons. When I got engaged, there was one thing that I really wanted to do, which was make my own wedding dress. At the time, I was a true novice. I had only sewn one outfit before this, a T-shirt and matching shorts when I was six! But sometimes ignorance is bliss, and not knowing that it was supposed to be difficult meant that I just went for it rather than over-thinking things.

It was the best experience, I learnt so much and ended up with a customised dress that fitted me perfectly and had all the details that I wanted. It was one of my proudest achievements, and even won Make It Today magazine’s Dressmaker of the Year, Occasion category! This just shows what is achievable when you put your mind to it. Where there’s a will, there’s a wedding dress!

If you’re thinking of making your own wedding dress, where to begin? When I started out, I spent ages trawling the internet for advice. Here I’ve compiled a list of top tips from my own experience and those of other home sewists who have made their own fabulous and varied wedding dresses. Hopefully this will save you a bit of stress and encourage you to go for it!