I am lucky enough to have made some wonderful friends at work. Friends who are smart, fun, sweet, supportive and interested in happenings of life outside of the workplace. Alyssa is one of these friends.
When Alyssa got engaged to the love of her life Connor, we all were, of course, delighted and so happy for her! We threw a bridal shower for her at work which was super fun, and sent her off to enjoy her wedding day and honeymoon in Hawaii.
Several months before the wedding, as one usually does, Alyssa purchased a beautiful wedding dress that fit her perfectly, but needed to be hemmed. Guess who she asked to alter her special dress for her? Yours Truly!
She came over to my apartment for the first fitting already bearing gifts. She made me this wonderful box to use as a platform for alteration clients to step up on while pinning a hem. She even painted it with my Love, Stephanie logo on it. It is perfect and I love it! So sweet!
As she was trying on her dress, she thought it would be really nice to add a little “sumpn’, sumpn'” to it for two reasons: one to add her own twist and flair to the dress, and two to add extra support to the little skinny straps so that they don’t cut into her shoulder so with all the weight of the beaded bodice and full skirt of the dress.
Hemming the skirt was part 1 of the alteration which was the easy part:
It was a pretty even cut around the three layers of the skirt. The tulle outer layer was just cut off, and the two under layers I used a baby hem. (Wedding) cake!
I thought I could take what I cut off the hem of the skirt lining and use the fabric to make skinny straps. We played with some ribbon I had laying around and came up with a nice criss cross strappy design for the back of the dress. Here we I just pinned the ribbon in the pattern that we liked for the straps:
I cut strips out of the scraps of the hem, and sewed long skinny tubes out of the strips, then sewed in by hand the straps to the front of the bodice.
At the back side of the dress, I sewed in tiny clear snaps to the inside of the dress and the the mate to the snap near the end of the strap.
I needed her once again to try on the dress and make the straps exactly the right length across her back so that they were long enough to go across her back, but didn’t sag when worn.
Fast forward to the Big Day. Everything went smoothly, the straps held up, and the bride was radiant in her beautiful customized dress. Yay!!!
Congratulations Alyssa and Connor! May you have the rest of your lives together filled with love and happiness!
Love,
Stephanie
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