My Puffy Pink Wedding Dress

Here’s the moment I know you’ve all been waiting for – photos of my puffy pink wedding dress! When I bought the dress, I talked about my decision to buy instead of sew and what this dress represented for who I am and where I’m at in my life journey. And I’m delighted to say that this token example of flamboyance and self-expression was the perfect accompaniment for the start of my new life. I’m already happier and healthier than I was when I bought the dress (I was still in graduate school at the time) and I am SO excited about everything that lies ahead! There’s been some big bumps in my life journey getting me to where I am right now and who I am right now and this dress was everything I wanted it to be as a declaration that I’m silly, flamboyant, and unusual, and proud to be so!

Of course, since this is a sewing blog, I have to give you a peak at the dress’s guts, even if I wasn’t the one to design or sew them, since I think they are pretty interesting. Having not sewn many ball gowns, I found the construction of the skirt particularly interesting since there is SO much volume but no solid structure (one almost expects a hoop skirt under this thing, no?) and not too much weight.

The body had an unremarkable corseted under-layer that closed with 2 hook and eyes (I added in a 3rd). The bodice fashion fabric had a bottom layer that held the shape and then had the pleated fabric on top, tacked down in a few place and sewed into the side seams. There was one major flaw in the dress’s construction that had me in a tissy a few days before the wedding – the dress had an invisible zipper that absolutely would not zip through the many layers of bodice if there was any tension on the seam (it baaaarely zipped when the dress was flat on the ground). Of course we discovered this 3 days before the wedding (The sales clerk told me it fit. Which it did. I never considered that she never actually did the zipper.) and my mom and cousin turned my back very red from trying to get that dang zipper done! For the wedding, I ended up buttoning the buttons without zipping the zipper underneath (with a big tulle bow on hand in case the buttons popped) and it worked out just fine.

Like I said, the really interesting part to me was the skirt, so here it is from the inside out. On the very inside was a plain petticoat.

Attached to the outside of the petticoat was three layers of gathered coarse net, sewn at different heights along the skirt.

Covering the inner petticoat was an underskirt of a solid blush satin with a horsehair braid along the bottom.

Next was three layers of white tulle, gathered into the waist.

Then three layers of colored tulle, gathered into the waist. There were peach, pink, and blush colored tulles that we overlapping and distributed along the skirt such that there were very subtle vertical stripes of color (hard to see in any of the photos, but a really lovely effect).

And finally, three layers of white tulle on top!

Watermarked photos taken by Rosemary Wagner Photography.