Yes, I custom dyed this gorgeous dress for this amazing bride!

Here is my journey with dyeing wedding dresses

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Let me tell you a little bit about my journey into adding color into bridal wear. As you know, I have been for the past thirty or more years in the bridal industry and I started out, like many seamstresses, making wedding dresses from scratch back in those dinosaur days. It was quite common to have a seamstress make your dress from scratch.

I LOVE SILK

And pretty quick into the process, I realized I really like silk. And so I would convince these brides that they needed their dress made out of silk because basically it’s the same amount of labor, same cost for the labor to have a silk dress as a junk dress. And that was back in the days when you could even find acetate in the fabric stores. And so there were some very poor choices that could happen. At some point it evolved to where I only made wedding dresses out of silk. But I had a lot of silk scraps, and I loved my silk.

I inherited some very old antique hats. Most of these hats were those little tiny pillbox hats. And they were so cute and had velvet flowers and little cages.

DOLL CLOTHES

But I didn’t know what to do with them .I started thinking, let’s look at these old antique dolls. And I went and I found these patterns that are actually taken off of the dolls in museums. And so they’re the exact pattern that this particular doll wore. And the patterns came in the exact sizes that this doll was produced in. And they were beautiful, lovely. If I made dresses from these sweet patterns, I could put those little pillbox hats on them.

I had all this silk, and I thought, I can dye it to match those hats and make little outfits. So I started doing that and selling them at doll shows. I wasn’t really I’m not a doll person, so I wasn’t super embraced in the whole process. But I really liked using up my silk, and I actually loved those little pillbox hats when they were on these dolls.. These old antique dolls look so appropriate and so charming, and they were actually in people’s homes being displayed instead of up in my closet on a high shelf so that the kids didn’t get into them. And so I felt good about it, and it was work. It was fine. It was lovely.

FEATHERS AND OMBRE

I also learned how to dye feathers, and how to curl feathers. That was fun. How to do ombre silk ribbons. Oh, that was so fun to put on the hats, and then to add matching little sashes on the dresses. Most of my laces I got from antique shops.

I got very comfortable and familiar with dyeing silk, laces and feathers. Well, finally I ran out of hats. So I said goodbye to the dolls. I had some really cool skills I learned during that little time, and I was still definitely sewing wedding dresses. I’d have gone nuts if I just sewed doll clothes. It it’s not my thing.

QUINCEANERA

I started working at a bridal shop and the owner decided she was going to sell quinceanera dresses. She bought a big batch of white quinceanera dresses. Lovely. People start coming in. They asked “What colors do they come in?” Her budget was completely blown on all the white ones.

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I said, well, why don’t you just let me dye some of these. And so I dyed them different colors. I just did the pastel colors. I knew enough about dyeing to know that these polyester dresses would not dye rich, deep colors.

It was a brand new experience for me, working with polyesters instead of silk. And so it was quite a learning curve.

I started incorporating colored beadwork into the dresses. Well, the quinceanera customers loved the beadwork and they wanted more and more. And some of them enjoyed the white dresses with the colored beadwork. That way they were having a traditional white, but they were getting the color beaded in.

Those sweet little grandmas would always say “More beadwork, more beadwork.” I had always enjoyed beadwork, so truly I had no problem with that request. And I loved those sweet little grandmas. I really like how it’s a family affair.

So that’s my color journey. That’s how I learned how to dye wedding dresses.

​You may want to test the waters of some wedding dress dyeing. If you are not wanting to do that, Natalie Harris of Renegade Bridal is the pro to send people to. Here is a link to her website. 

Here are some videos you might like:

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