The doily dress

The time has finally come when I can reveal the purpose of all the doily making.  Let me present....

...my wedding dress!

As soon as I saw Jillian's  beautiful creation on Pinterest I thought that it would be wonderful if I could recreate something similar for myself.  She says that she made her dress in two weeks - that girl must crochet like lightning!  As documented here, I have been slowly making doilies for over a year (just in case).  This work was also interspersed with other crochet and quilting projects.  Around six months ago my partner and I decided to finally take the plunge and get married, so the project stepped up pace. 

I was very nervous about how the dress would turn out, after all, your wedding dress is guaranteed to get a lot of scrutiny! I am so happy and relieved that it turned out like I hoped. Here are some more pictures from the big day!

The nitty gritty

For those who like to know the hows and the whys, here are all the details of how I made the dress.

First I made a base dress. This is made using Vogue 8897 in blue polyester satin.
Next I used the same pattern pieces to make a net copy of the dress. The net is to give the doilies support, so that the weight didn't drag them out of shape.

All the doilies were made individually following patterns found free on the internet. I've counted them all, and there are 116 doilies on the dress; these vary from the biggest at over three foot, to teeny tiny ones an inch across. I wanted to only use each pattern twice, but there weren't enough very small patterns, so there are about a dozen of the tiny gap-filling flowers.

Using many, many safety pins, I arranged the doilies on the dress and then sewed them by hand to the net layer. It was essential to use a dressmakers dummy for this, as I needed the doilies to take the shape of the dress.

The net and the satin layers are only joined at the back, where I sewed the two together down each side of the zip. I didn't want an obvious line to show the zip, so I used hook and eye fasteners to close the doilies over the top.

I can remove the doily layer and have a very wearable blue satin dress. I am undecided what to do with the doilies now. They are all cotton, and sewn on with cotton thread, so one possibility is dying these to a less bridey colour.  After all this work its a shame to only wear it once!