Really, Actually, Completely Finished. For Now.

*note: more/better photos coming.*

Among costumers, it is known that a sewing project is never actually finished. It is "wearable," or possibly "good enough," but there is always something that gets left off because it's 2am and your fingers are bleeding and the event is tomorrow morning and you have to wake up in 4 hours to drive another 4 hours to the event.

So maybe you get all of the construction seams done, and plan on binding the raw edges later. Nobody but you is ever going to see them, right?

Or you leave off that last bit of trim that would take it from attractive to fabulous, because nobody needs to know that you actually intended for there to be TWO rows of knife pleats and a line of beaded lace around that 6-yard hem, instead of just one.

Or you opt for the quick-and-dirty modern construction method instead of the well-researched and documented historically accurate method, because only the snobbiest of costume snobs will know the difference.

But there's always some little niggling thing that you mean to go back and finish later, once the time pressure is off.

So it was with my wedding dress.


In my defence, I had a fairly DIY-intensive wedding; I made both my own dress and my husband's outfit, including my own shoes and most of my jewelry. We catered it ourselves, and provided most of the decorations. And we planned it all from halfway around the world. So I knew from the start that there was going to be more work than I could finish in the time that I had, and I set goals in tiers: wearable, good enough, complete, and completely insane. In the end, I made it to "good enough" and had a fabulous time at the party anyway.

The ability to take advantage of one's own wedding buffet is of the utmost importance.

But now it's been three years, and it's time to pick up where I left off.

You see, like the brides of yesteryear, I never intended my wedding dress to be a single-use garment. No, by the gods, if I'm going to put that much time and energy into something, I'm going to wear it again and again!

I'm a pretty pretty princess!

The outfit consisted of a self-supporting linen shift, a linen 12-gore cotehardie that laced up the back, and a sleeveless robe made of heavy wool trimmed with velvet, decorated with couched cord knotwork and velvet appliqué oak leaves, and adorned with what were supposed to be Viking oval brooches with bead festoons (except that the vendor neglected to inform me when I placed the order that my brooches wouldn't even be started before the wedding. Luckily, I was able to find a last-minute replacement, which was the Dragon Cloak Closure from Vault of Valhalla). There was also a girdle belt made from the same silver trim that I used on the cotehardie, mounted on top of the dark blue velvet that I used on the robe, with a giant silver brooch from Baltic Crossroads as the centerpiece.

The top layer is pure fantasy, but the cotehardie is historically accurate enough to wear to Medieval/SCA events, so I set to work on all of the little details that I didn't have time to finish the first time around.

I started with the bits that were visible from the outside: the eyelets and back lacing. Metal eyelets/grommets were not regularly used until the 19th century. An eyelet that was expected to receive a great deal of wear might have been reinforced with a metal ring, but most eyelets on garments were simply bound with thread.

Begone, anachronistic shiny silver!

My dress had something like 57 eyelets running down the back, and there was simply no way I would have the time to stitch them all by hand before the wedding. Instead, I got the smallest metal grommets I could find and started hammering away. At the wedding, the eyelets were covered by the sleeveless robe, so the anachronism didn't particularly matter. I want to be able to wear my cotehardie without the elf-tastic robe though, so visible metal grommets simply won't do. I fired up Netflix, and slowly, ever so slowly, began the painstaking process of hand-stitching over all of that historically inaccurate silver.

So. Many. Eyelets.

Ironically, it takes much more time to completely cover a shiny metal eyelet with thread than it does to stitch the eyelet in thread in the first place, so by taking the faster solution for the short term, I made considerably more work for myself in the long-run. There's a life lesson there, I'm pretty sure.

To go along with my anachronistic silver grommets, the back of my dress was laced with a polyester ribbon. (Again, nobody was going to see it, and at least it was spiral laced instead of criss-crossed.) The ribbon has now been replaced with a lucet cord of size 10 crochet cotton in a pretty matching blue that I found in my stash. Cotton still isn't quite period, but it's a whole lot closer than polyester. As an added bonus, the lucet cord is stiff enough to poke through the eyelets without the need for a needle or aglet. At some point, I may dip the end in beeswax to give it even more rigidity.

Next up was the bit that affects structural integrity: seam binding.

My dress was made from two layers of light-to-medium weight linen. In the interest of time, I cheated and used a 19th century construction technique that I learned from making corsets, where you sew through four layers of fabric at once: two of lining, two of outer, right sides together, making a kind of double-sided welt seam. (like this, except I omitted the topstitching since I didn't need the extra strength.)

The disadvantages of this technique are that it can only be used for certain seams, and it's more or less impossible to alter the fit of your garment once it's sewn. The advantage is that you end up with a fully lined garment with almost no exposed raw edges while sewing only half as many seams as on a traditional bag lining. I was able to use this technique for all of the body pieces, but couldn't use it to attach the sleeves, so they were just treated as flat-lined and set in with an ordinary seam. This means that there were exposed raw edges around my armscye! Gasp! Horror! (So I get a little bit neurotic about raw edges.)

I'd already tempted fate by running those exposed raw edges through the wash once—what? Your wedding dress isn't machine washable?—so clearly it was time to fell those seams.

Finally, it was time for the icing on the cake: moar trim!!!1!

The trim that I used on my wedding dress is something I spotted in the garment district in downtown L.A. years ago. I have never seen it in another shop anywhere, in person or online. When I found it, the shop owner told me it had been discontinued, and I bought up everything that he had. It's not the finest quality I've ever seen, but it's exactly the color (satiny, non-metallic silver) and motif (oak leaves and acorns) that I'd been searching for fruitlessly for a very long time. I used it to face the neckline and put a band of it around the wrists. I always intended to put another band around the skirt, just below knee-height, but simply ran out of time.

So that's it. Three years later, I've finally taken my wedding dress from "good enough" to "complete."

But wait. What's that, you say? I said that a sewing project is never truly finished. I said that I set four tiers of goals for my dress. What about "completely insane"?

Oh no, I haven't forgotten about that. Don't worry. I just want to get some more use out of this dress before moving it back to the "unfinished projects" pile for months (years?) on end.

I love the silver ribbon trim that I found, but it is, as I said, not the highest quality. The weave is not terribly fine, but the acorn and oak leaf pattern is absolutely perfect. One day, when the unfinished project pile of shame is a lot smaller, I'm going to take that pattern and embroider over it. On the dress, and on the matching girdle belt. And then, my dears, it will be finished.

But not today.