Hello! The big day: buying the lace!

Hello everyone!
I'm Susan.  I have 3 lovely daughters & my youngest is planning to be married in April 2014!  The engagement occurred in June 2013 and at some point I offered to sew her wedding gown.  It seemed like a good idea since we are all sentimental in our family & love heirlooms.  I know there is someone out there like me who wants to do this & the purpose of this blog is to share my adventures in bridal couture!

In the summer of 2013 Sarah, her sisters & a friend & I went to a few bridal shops & Sarah tried on many beautiful gowns so we had an idea of her favorite looks.  When I considered making the gown, we went fabric shopping in September at the best place I have discovered in Atlanta for lovely fashion fabric (Gail K).  We pondered over their many selections of lace and then considered them as well as a dress design over the holidays.
After pouring over many bridal magazines I bought 3 commercial patterns to merge into 1 gown.
These were:  Vogue v8849 for the bodice front, Vogue v1032 for the bodice back, & Butterick b5182 for the skirt.
I also bought a dress form to make fitting easier since we can't always get together due to our tight schedules.

In January I bought a most essential book:  Bridal Couture by Susan Khalje after reading rave reviews online.  They were right.  This book is great!  It is easy to understand & well illustrated.  It was written in 1997 & now out of print.  I got mine online.  You need to get past some outdated dress styles though the sewing techniques are timeless.

So after reading about the important step of making a muslin of the dress first, I put together the pattern pieces and sewed up a muslin dress for fitting.  This is really a great idea since you will have many fittings & do not want to wear out your expensive fabric trying to get a perfect fit!  After 3 fittings, snow delays & lots of reading we were finally ready to purchase the fabric.  You need to realize that sewing beaded lace with irregular motifs requires you to fit the pattern onto the lace with the lace motifs in mind and it's somewhat like a puzzle as opposed to using a smooth flat fabric.  It's somewhat like matching plaids but a thousand times more challenging.  Take heart, however, you can do it if you think it out first.  (Remember measure twice, cut once)!

Today was the big day to purchase the fabric.  We went to the fabric store an took our muslin patterns with us.  We chose a beautiful beaded lace, silk organza for the underlining & silk charmeuse for the underdress.  I decided to wait to get the lining fabric until I could see how the dress felt after construction.

So tomorrow I will experiment with pattern placement on the bodice!
And sew it goes... See you later with pics!