Step By Step To Design Your Own Wedding Dress
Summary: If you are reading this then you probably have some familiarity with crafts and sewing.  As someone who has designed and sewn a couple wedding dresses I would like to give you a short guide on making a wedding dress so you hopefully won’t spend more money of fixing mistakes you make in your dress than you would buying a brand new one.

The first step you need to take when you are designing your dress is deciding how far you want to go with designing it; do you want to design and sew every detail?  Do you want to embellish an existing dress?  Will you just create the dress on paper and hire a seamstress or designer to assemble it? In any case you want to honestly assess the skill level of your techniques.

When I mean honest, I mean you do not want to be like my aunt the first time she constructed her daughter’s wedding dress.  Her daughter was so disappointed with the fabrics and the fitting.  So make sure you do not over estimate your abilities. Making your own wedding dress is also not really the time to learn how to sew.

After you have decided what you will do you need to start planning the materials you will need for your wedding dress.  If you are designing your own pattern and sewing it or having it sewn you need to choose fabric for your dress.  The traditional choices are silk and satin, but anything is fair game these days, including the color, you might choose the typical white or ivory, or you may go with another color of your own choice.

The pattern of your dress will have to be decided prior to cutting and sewing the materials.  There are a number of patterns available in store and on the web.  If you are creating your own pattern, ensure you have good measurements of your own figure and a book on designing dress patterns available.  You will want to make the dress at this point to get it ready for additional design elements.

The additional materials you will need will include items to embellish your dress design.  You will need to do this step too if you are buying a plain dress and adding embellishments to it.  Items you will want to invest in for dress adornment include: flowers, gems, pins, and lace.  You may even choose to add very custom pieces like personal images or needlework.

After you have all the dress, any additional materials and your design ideas ready, it’s time to put it all together and try your beautiful masterpiece on.  Any alterations can be done at this point, but make sure you are wearing a bra of the type you will be wearing at your wedding to ensure all the pieces end up in the right place.

If all goes well, you will have your wonderful, original dress together in good time for the wedding.  It may be a lot of work, but you know a dress you design will look like no one else’s, and will be one everyone talks about.