The Wedding Gown; or, satin and lace

MOTB here, with the history of Kathryn's wedding gown, now that all the hoopla is over and I've actually made up some of the many hours of lost sleep. As with so much else in life, if I'd realized what I was getting in for, I might not have insisted on my Sicilian mother's admonition about making one's own wedding gown being bad luck when Kathryn proposed it. Given her incredibly heavy schedule aboard ship, I might have at least suggested she buy one...but then again.

When this all began, K sent me a couple of pictures of a character from the TV series Firefly wearing a dress she liked. Problem was that the top of this dress (fig. 1) is black, and the actress wearing it had long black hair, obscuring all details of the neckline, and not showing very much of the structure of the burnt orange overskirt. So off her father and I went to rent the video, on which, mercifully, the actress stood up and turned around, her hair swinging forward and slightly up for an instant--just long enough to get the neckline shape. As she turned, too, some seam

lines and skirt details became more apparent. That was it. . figure 1

I then went in search of patterns, and ended up with four, each with some part--potentially--of what I thought Kate was aiming for. From this, and the figure I'd brought back from my mother's things back in 1996 that I'd padded as best I could with Kate's (then) measurements, work began on a muslin version that was sent to her. Her matron of honor, also living in Norfolk, was good enough to help her with a fitting (fig. 2).

figure 2
The muslin dress arrived back with a message that outside of a tuck in at the waist, it was fine. Armed with new courage, I started cutting the satin for the underdress and the lining. ...With less than a month to the wedding now, I assembled the lining and was about to attach the bodice to the skirt of the gown, when Kate wrote to say she thought the neckline wasn't right--she wanted the shoulder straps more like a shrug and the corners of the neckline farther out to the sides. Now beginning to panic about time, I first called my friend Carolyn Johnson for solace, who also sews. She came over, took on another job for the wedding so I could have my fit and in the end accept the changes enough to work the idea out in muslin on the figure. I am ever in her debt for that, and for pointing out a simple detail that had escaped me about the cut of the waistline of the lace overgown that helped resolve how it would fit over the undergown. (Any changes in the undergown naturally had to be accounted for in overgown.)

From this point on, it was sheer endurance. As all journeys begin with the first step, so I put one "foot" in front of the other with my head down, and kept walking.... Basting the enormously long seams seemed endless, so that I looked forward to running seams on my mother's workhorse Necchi, as I assembled the pieces of the dress (figures 3 & 4):

figure 3
figure 4
and braced to cut into the lace--that fabulous soft lace of delicate leaves that Kate had found at a store in Cincinnati earlier when she was home briefly on leave. (That too, was remarkable. We'd found out that there was a store that "all the brides go to for lace" in Cincinnati from our florist--who'd just learned about it from a radio DJ whose fiance had just learned of it--but we didn't know its name. Carolyn to the rescue again. One of her sisters did know of it, and within an hour, she'd gotten us the information. Kate hopped into her Honda, and lo, when she got there, they were having a sale: buy 2 yards, get 1 free. She also found a beautiful beaded lace for the veil, about which more later. If you want information on the store, let us know.)

The lace was also remarkable because both selvages were scalloped in an unusual two-small-one-large pattern. At first I tried to see if I could imitate it with the Necchi for the hem and elsewhere, including making a guide in acrylic that I thought I could sew against with the zig-zag stitch. But that just proved far more tedious and time consuming then I could allow, when it came to me that the easiest solution would be to cut off the selvages and applique them along all the edges that I wanted scalloped. "Easiest" did I say? Well, a glutton for punishment, I ploughed ahead, appliquing not only the entire hem of the overjacket (including of course the train [figure 5]), but both sides of the center back panel up to the waist (figure 6), either side of the front opening from the waist to the hem (figure 7), and around the neckline (figure 8). You can see a detail of the scalloped edge standing up around the back of the neck in figure 9.
figure 5
figure 6

figure 7


figure 8

figure 9

On then to the sleeves (with points) and the many self-covered satin buttons figure 10).

figure 10

I don't think I lifted my head for days--just ploughed faithfully ahead, hour after hour. Alan kept me fed and encouraged as each section was brought to the next stage, racing against time, as that bloody clock ticked mercilessly away. Any false step would mean hours of undoing and redoing, hours I couldn't afford.

I have to inject here that I haven't a lot of direct experience as a dressmaker. When Kate was younger, I slapped together a few costumes for halloween, but nothing that required the sort of finishing detail--inside as well as out--as this. What I did have is a mother who was a master seamstress (as they were called in those days of sexist language), who could fit anyone. She had been head draper at Bergdorf-Goodman before she married, but my father had said that his wife wouldn't have to work--then he put her to work in his grocery-meat markets over the next thirty years. I've never been able to bring myself to forgive him for that--who knows what would have come from her hands?--but I have come to terms with it. As it was, after a grueling day at the store on her feet, she would come home and stay up into the night sewing, making dresses for us, taking in alterations, fitting women that others found impossible to fit, draping new ideas on her figures. There was always a mound of fabric around, the machine was never closed, the cutting table always in use. Being the last of the children, I stayed home longest--perhaps also because rather than being sent to school in New York City, I went to the nearest parochial school in New Rochelle where we then lived. I think now that if she had been working professionally I probably would not have been privy to all this dress making, all this handling of fabric and patterns, all this pinning and draping--she might not have done any of it at home had she done it at work. As it was, she taught me everything there was to know about her art without really trying. I was captivated by watching her and as I worked on Kate's gown I realized that I had taken in much, much more in than I realized. Still, I decided even then, as a childm, that it was senseless to compete against such mastery, so I didn't take it up seriously. What I did take up in my bones from her, though, was a love of working with my hands. And that is a wholely different story.

When Kate got home a week before the wedding, I made her drop her suitcase, shower, and try on the dress. A nip and tuck in a couple of places and, miraculously (well, not so miraculously...methodically and 3-days' work would be better), it fit. Now I could move on to the veil, which we'd never even discussed. Whew! Since the lace for that was a 3-yard length wilth two raw cut edges, I knew I was in for more hours of appliquing. The selvages, on the other hand, were gorgeous. One was delicately scalloped, the other more elaborately, and the entire thing was beaded with the tiniest round and teardrop pearls imaginable. We decided to bring the scalloped edges around to eliminate the raw edges, a process that required cutting away some of the central portion of the lace. It took hours to applique that delicate a fabric. Meanwhile, I built a satin circle for the headpiece, and in the last hours before the wedding attached the veiling to it. I was making the last stitches when Kate came in and said, "Mom! we have to leave. NOW!"

It was 10 AM. The wedding was to be at 11 AM. I could hear my mother having the last laugh. 38 years (plus one month) earlier, my mother was in my apartment in New York still sewing the lace gloves on my maid of honor and bridesmaid, telling me Alan "would wait" as the clocked ticked twenty-five minutes into the ceremony when I had said the same thing to her. That's still another story, which doesn't bear repeating here. Luckily, I WAS done, essentially. So I lept into my own dress and off we went. And, happily, Kate was a spectacular bride.


Here's the final version. This and the other pictures of the gown on the figure were taken a few days after the wedding. When Kathryn gets home next, I'll have her put it on and take the final, formal pictures.