Wedding Dress Pt 2: Fabric Selection
A touch of glamour
In Part One, we discussed the process of finding a design and silhouette that felt right, truly me.
It was decided. I was going to make a simple style with a glamorous👏🏽 as👏🏽 hell👏🏽 fabric. Mind you, I appreciate nice things, but I don’t generally let myself have them. So this whole project is very meaningful for me. I started searching far and wide for sequined or beaded fabrics that might suit my tastes. Honestly, there aren’t many online shops that sell high-quality fabrics in this style, and very few shops have bridal options at all. A decent amount of Etsy sellers existed, but it all seemed to come from China. I bought samples from far and wide, with varying levels of quality.
I found that the folks at Bridal Fabrics (a shop in the UK), as their name might suggest, had the best selection for options with some shine. I fell utterly, deeply, MADLY in love with a beaded tulle called that features clear glass beads that sparkle and shine and refract in the light stunningly. They are laid out in beautiful swoops and swirls in an almost 1920’s ish era design. It also has the occasional silver diamanté and some clear sequins as well. Another post coming with the challenges of working with this tricky beaded fabric that let’s just say was a situation. But the fabric is utterly stunning and try as I may attempting to fall in love with something else, I just couldn’t get my mind off of it. Mind you, it is also an utterly ridiculous $200 USD PER YARD. I literally did not think fabric so expensive existed. Like, how. *
Your girl attempting to ~*~ VIsUaLiZe ~~ what the final gown might look like with some sample options.
I searched the internet -high and low- for a more affordable one that I could love *almost* as much… and I failed. So I went for the good stuff. And I never regretted it. I justify to myself that fully beaded gowns at retail still cost 5x what I put into my dress.
(*I should disclose - I asked the folks at Bridal Fabrics for a discount in exchange for letting you all know where I purchased it. They kindly obliged. So now you know. But even then, damn it was still pricey 😂)
Silks for breathability
We landed on a small destination wedding in Puerto Vallarta in Mexico in May. Read: hot and humidddd 🥵 I was not about to be messing around with no polyester layers in the heat (poly is basically plastic and, as you would imagine, plastic does not breathe). Which, is of course, most of what’s available and the most affordable for bridal satins and such. Sigh.
Lover of natural fibers that I am regardless (more sustainable bc they decompose rather than sit in a landfill forever) it was not a hard decision then to use only silks for the underlayers. Silks naturally breathe very well, and are of course, simply glamorous. In reality, I will never have such a good excuse to indulge myself again, so here we are fam. I decided to do silk organza/ habotai underlining for stability, below a silk stretch charmeuse base layer (because ✨shine✨ and drapey flow for silhouette hugging goodness) and then my beaded tulle on top (which, is polyester, but as a net is naturally breathable). I chose a stretch charmeuse (95% silk and 5% lycra) so that my dress would have a little give, and I might have a little room to mess up if my body weight fluctuated any between design and wedding day. More on underlining to come and why I used two different kinds!
Now that we’re stocked up with fabrics and spent the entire dress project budget (!), next up: the beginnings of the drafting process! Check out Part Three: Designing the Gown.