For a bride-to-be, what’s more exciting, really, than figuring out what your dress is going to look like?  Well, yeah, there’s that little thing of pledging your undying love, of course. But you really want to be wearing something totally unique that expresses yourself whilst promising to be another person’s rock for the rest of eternity. Handmade Wedding Series readers should by now know about the merits of DIY.

But then it hit me as I actually started looking into the whole dress deal: I’m totally out of my element when it comes to making a custom dress. Yours truly is not a strong sewer. In fact, I don’t sew.  At all. Love clothes, yes. Know anything about how they were made? Nope.

But with all the excitement over Alchemy combined with my penchant for thrill of the hunt, I’m on a mission to get a custom wedding dress. I did feel a bit like a fish out of water with the totally open possibilities for working with a designer to create a dress from scratch, so I met with local designer kcoline. She showed me an example of the process she went through to create a wedding dress for her friend (let’s call her Francoise).

First, she had Francoise do some research, looking through fashion magazines and trolling Google image search and flickr for designs that caught her eye. They decided on a price-range up-front and then decided the actual price once they settled on a design and the fabric that would be used. They got together with all the reference materials she’d gathered and they found some aspects in common — even though Francoise still wasn’t sure what she wanted.

She had ben excited by a few dresses from the Vera Wang website. Another one of the images she tore from a magazine — while clearly not a wedding dress — had a certain old-fashioned, almost Renaissance feel to it, with some draping, sheer sleeves and layering toward the bottom.

Overall, it was important to Francoise that the dress be unique and that kcoline would be able to do something to include her own vision in it, too. After a couple weeks they got together again to see some basic sketches kcoline had done.

Some had that bit of a Renaissance flavor.

While some of the sketches were inspired by the Vera Wang styles.

kcoline also brought some fabric samples with a range of price per yard, textures, and colors so that Francoise could feel the textures and they could talk about things like how the fabric would drape or whether it would work color-wise.

In the end, the dress turned out to be something completely unique.  Black velvet across the bust, a variety of fabric tiered flouncing at the bottom and lace sleeves for a bit of frill — these give the gown an old-fashioned twist. The shimmery fabric for the rest bring out a bit of modern glam.

Ok, so now to my brainstorming!  I need to resist the temptation to talk about what I’m doing here on the Storque because it’s all top-secret from my man, an oft Storque reader. Hush!

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