(Un)Crafty Bride on a Budget: The Wedding Dress
A dozen years, or so, before my wedding. I ask my mum to make me a white version of this green Jigsaw dress, with a slit up the leg as well as a ruffle. She says Yes. I am single. She says she will figure out how to make it when the time comes. She is trying not to laugh. She will do it, though.
https://saranesbitt.co.uk/2011/08/22/week-eleven-of-why-so-many-clothes-the-best-of-clothes-the-worst-of-clothes/
Four years before our wedding, when our first daughter is tiny, and my mum has recently died, I watch a lot of Don’t Tell the Bride. I fantasise about what my wedding dress scene would be (although we are not engaged). I imagine my husband would find something lovely, and very thoughtful, but I would be in West Cork, in Alice Halliday’s studio, giving her my mum’s and granny’s linens to make something like this wedding dress she made from the bride’s grandma’s tablecloths.
When I propose to my husband, a year and a bit before our wedding, we consider a last-minute, seven-weeks-away booking on the (don’t-think-too-much-about-it) cancelledweddings.co.uk . I decide the dress doesn’t matter, I just dream madly of a simple shift, this amazing cape by Alice Halliday (made for Florence Welch) and these R. Soles boots.
We settle down, decide a real budget, and I realise my £150 dress and shoes budget won’t quite cover one boot.
A year before the wedding, I find, on ebay, a white version of my green jigsaw dress, with a slit up the leg as well as a ruffle. It’s £79; it’s an original 1990s Ghost dress, probably one I eyed up as a child, seeing the perfect wedding dress. It’s an ethereal copy of what I’d dreamed up with my mum.
A few months before the wedding, I realise that a chiffon white dress and a one-of-a-kind, beaded cape and two small, gorgeous, beloved, huggable children, who will be eating a lot of chocolate wedding cake, will not mix well. I decide to get a back up dress and to find a less delicate cape, veil or shawl.
I order a dress from ebay, but the corset stops an inch above the waist of the bodice, and it does odd things with my body. My oldest child suggests I sew fabric flowers onto my waist. It seems feasible… In the end, I resell the dress for what I paid (£20).
Can you tell one of my kids took this pic?
I try a dress on in a charity shop near work. I decide white suits me. I become emboldened. I decide I will look good in anything. This is better than the me who has been worrying about her mother’s apron in her Ghost dress, wanting there to be less of me.
I buy a back up dress on ebay for £30.
In amongst my mum’s old clothes, I think, is the rainbow catsuit she had always wanted to wear as her Mother of the Bride outfit. It comes with a cape, I vaguely remember. There is a studio photo of my mum wearing the ensemble, in the Seventies. Her mum had bought it from a graduate of Central St Martin’s.* I recall a capelet, which wouldn’t be right. I check, anyway. I open up the storage bag to find a flowing, sheer, rainbow cape. My wedding cape.
I also get hold of a rainbow mermaid dress, for when the red wine starts to flow and the dancing is in full swing and there may be spills…. and briefly consider wearing it down the aisle instead, with the cape.
A perfectly tidy craft and study area
Of course, my period has to make a feature of itself at my wedding. My cycle goes doolally, so that I will definitely be on on my wedding day. As anyone who has lived with Endometriosis knows, my paper thin, white, chiffon dress is not going to be comfortable. My back up dress becomes The Dress.
My period got something right. I loved The Dress; it went with the Lizzie Bennet hair. It sat unobtrusively under my mum’s rainbow cape, which cradled me in her rainbow colours as I walked up the aisle, with and without her. When the cape was off, The Dress held me, showed me, and was utterly comfortable.
Photos by Tracy Morter www.tracymorter.com – an amazing wedding photographer
And, around midnight, I became as shiny as Tamatoa in sequins. ShiiiiinnnnneeeeeY!
*UPDATE – THE RAINBOW CAPE DESIGNER
I am exhilarated to have met someone online whose mum has the dress version of the rainbow catsuit and cape. It turns out the designer is Jean Varon, who is credited by some as the true inventor of the miniskirt, and who dressed Diana Rigg in The Avengers.
I love the threads that connect us all.
