Rustic Luxe Chiffon wedding dress with giant rose sequin lace

The journey to creating this dress was so worth the effort to capture Abby’s true style. (She had originally purchased a RTW dress after trying a larger sample size, but when it arrived in her actual size was a super slim mermaid dress - which looked fantastic for sure, but really wasn’t her style at all.)

Abby contacted me at the beginning of the summer, before her October wedding to see if I could turn something around super quick. I loved her style immediately and really wanted to create her vision for her. She bought her hair piece with her which she loved, a metal hair slide in an antique gold tone, with leaves and vines.

We managed to design the dress almost instantly, deciding on long sleeves, a blouson cross-over top and a skimming but flared skirt in smooth porcelain chiffon, with lace detail on the hem! (sometimes I feel I make dresses sound so boring!! - This one definitely is not!) To pinch Abby’s description of her style, for her wedding at lease, it is rustic luxe, which sums up everything perfectly!

We met one day in London to go to all the best lace shops in London, down Berwick street, and lastly to Joel and Sons, which is a shop like no other - if you can dream in fabric, this shop will sell it!! Abby loved a lace which featured a huge rose design, each rose was about 30cm in diameter, I’d never seen anything like it before. In addition, I found two other laces with similar roses in medium and large sizes to grow the lace flowers around the hem getting smaller as the climb. Abby chose another lace too, from The Silk Society, which was a subtle pearl and antique silver sequin and beaded lace which had a sort of petal and leaf design which I cut out the individual shapes, as with the roses, and scattered these around making further texture to the design.
The bodice blouson was quite difficult to achieve, with so many tweaks, and just as you perfect one bit, you move another off track. Too much blouson, not enough … but so worth the the work for the outcome! The sleeve is a sort of fake raglan sleeve, keeping the usual sleeve head, but adding a tulle cross section at the shoulder, which I always think is such a beautiful line on the body!
The shoulders and sleeves were appliqued too with sprigs of lace, trickling down onto the bodice to blur any hard seam lines, and a design around the cuff too.

I so loved this dress in every sense, from the bride and her vision, to the end result! She looks amazingly beautiful in her wedding photos by Sarah Beth Photo . I hope you love it too!

You can actually see more here in a feature on Love my Dress.