Wedding Wednesday: Plans for the Dress

My parents' wedding
my beautiful mother wearing the dress

Plans for the Dress

I never imagined that I would get to wear my mother's wedding dress. Until this December I couldn't remember having ever even seen the dress other than in pictures, because it wasn't really my mother's dress.

When my Tante Henny (my mother's sister) was getting married in the early eighties, she paid $1000 for a  beautiful chiffon and lace wedding dress. My mom told me she remembers thinking that was an awful lot of money.

Being the practical woman that she is, when my mom got married a few years later she borrowed the dress.

Tante Suzy & Oom Bruno's Wedding
My aunt wearing the dress, I'm the bald one on my mom's lap

Fast forward a little later and it was my Tante Suzy's turn to get married and she too wore the dress. So all three sisters shared the same dress and then it was packed away in my Tante Henny's house for a quarter century.

Before alterations

And then Chris and I got engaged and my aunt very generously offered to let me wear the dress too.

Before alterations


Unfortunately, I'm not as skinny as they were in the eighties and, while I loved the look, it wasn't really what we were going for at our wedding. But, incredibly, my aunt gave me carte blanche to do whatever I want to it.

Dress Front


I had a bunch of different ideas floating around in my head until we met with an amazing seamstress who was able to bring them all together.

Deanna Fokes was highly recommended by a friend and Chris and I are so excited to be working with her. She sketched out a fantastic design to transform the dress my mother and all her sisters wore into something unlike anything I could hope to find in a bridal shop.

Dress Back

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Flash's Guardians of the Galaxy Birthday Party

Image
As Axel's birthday falls so close to Halloween, I was hoping to save a little sanity by working his Halloween costume into his party theme. He was really excited about his upcoming Rocket and Groot party, but, three-year-olds being the fickle creatures that they are, on the day of the party he insisted that he would be the Flash and nothing could convince him otherwise. Now that Axel is getting older he has strong opinions on things, like how his party should be, which can be a little challenging for me, but on the flip side he is able to help out with the preparations which is a lot of fun. This theme worked well for the skill levels of a preschooler since nebulas and starscapes don't need to be precise and actually look best a little messy. My little helper and I had a great time baking and decorating galaxy star sugar cookies and painting the photobooth backdrop. His pride in the projects was so heartwarming, I'm smiling just thinking of it.   We als...
Read more

Meet Bertha

Image
She's a beast. A 2000 Ford E-150, she's had a pretty rough life. She's been an airport shuttle bus and hauled countless lengths of hardwood for a flooring company. But life is about to get much better as she's now been tasked with taking us on an epic road trip. It'll be fun times like this and this
Read more

Superman Saga

Image
I previously posted that Chris and I were making Superman costumes for Burning Man. In honour of the Metropolis theme, a world record breaking gathering of people dressed as Superman was scheduled for noon on Burn Day and we didn't want to miss out on the fun. On top of our own costumes, I was making S shield patches to give out to anyone who may have forgotten their superhero outfits at home. Unfortunately, I didn't buy the iron-on interfacing for the patches (and read the instructions) until I had already traced and cut out a couple dozen red logos . Only afterwards did I realize that it would be much easier to iron the interfacing to the red fabric before cutting it all out. So I started over. Luckily I had plenty of free red t-shirts to use and many many hours of riding in Bertha to spend cutting. I ironed the red shields onto a $2 yellow sheet in our hotel room in Reno and then added another layer of interfacing so the patches could be ironed onto shirts. Since...
Read more