A good chunk of my Christmas vacation was spent carefully cutting out single layers of silk, silk georgette, and lace on top of my parent’s ping-pong table, which was the perfect surface for spreading out all of this fabric and just wide enough for my fabric to fit. I realized after I started cutting out the silk that there was no way possible that I could have cut this out on the floor at home and have everything nice and smooth. I even had an earlier crazy idea to go into the office on a weekend and use the long conference tables pushed together in a meeting room to cut out all of my fabric, but the tables wouldn’t have been wide enough and I would have run out of time.
I’m happy to say, after many hours of careful pattern placement and cutting with my Gingher shears, I have all parts of my wedding dress cut out and ready to sew. I even went ahead and underlined and assembled the bodice while on vacation – that lace gave me a bit of a panic attack when I started to underline it with the silk because it ended up growing slightly, but after some careful pinning and stitching, everything went together just fine.
Here’s a little video of how my dress is coming together – I also talk about how exactly I cut out my silk and silk georgette, the problem I ran into with my lace, and some thoughts on the oh-so-coveted book Bridal Couture by Susan Khalje: