Embellishing my own wedding dress. Will it end in tears?

November 27, 2013 6:37 PM

How difficult would it be for a non-sewer to add lace or embroidered appliques to a dress?

I'm getting married next year (eee) and I've started looking at wedding dresses. I find I'm being drawn to dresses that are mostly white, but with a vibrant splash of colour, like this, this, and this. And in my dreams where I have a million dollars, anything by Claire Pettibone. So I started wondering--If I bought a plain white dress, which would probably be a white bridesmaid dress for various reasons, how hard would it be to add embellishments myself? I can sew a button on a coat, but I'm no seamstress. I assume the difficulty of this might depend on the type of dress I buy (fabric, seaming, ruching)? And if this is indeed too much for me to tackle, could I work with a seamstress to get the dress I want? What would I be looking at in terms of costs there? Any advice or suggestions greatly appreciated.

posted by Rora to Clothing, Beauty, & Fashion (17 answers total)

Well, you have two choices. You could either embroider the designs using colored thread or you could take pre-embroidered bits and appliqué them to the dress.

The first would make it look like the designs are more a part of the dress, but most embroidery can be fairly advanced, with complicated stitches. And the examples you linked to include a LOT of it.

The second might be doable. You'd go to a fabric store and purchase, or have made, pre-embroidered patches. Then you'd sew them onto the dress as invisibly as you could. It'd be painstaking but a novice could feasibly do it. Practice a bit on some scrap fabric.

But you'd REALLY REALLY have to want it. That's a lot of work, and finely detailed work.
posted by Liesl at 7:09 PM on November 27, 2013

Best answer: I think that if you have little experience sewing and crafting, your wedding dress is not the project to begin with. Is it difficult? Not exactly. Are you going to get the kinds of results you want on the first try without puncturing your dress full of holes, puckering and pulling threads out, and having something that looks frankly unskilled? Probably not. It's not that any one skill involved is difficult to master, it's that you need a fair amount of practice and confidence to approach the task without doing something that just badly screws it up, just out of inexperience.

And just to note, your choices are not basic, level 1 projects. They are the kinds of things that take professional embroidery skills.
posted by Miko at 7:22 PM on November 27, 2013 [15 favorites]

if you get pre-made embroidered flowers, you can actually get away with with big, uneven stitches, as long as your thread color matches pretty well (not hard to get)...work the stitches so they run parallel to the ones in the applique so they blend in. You will want to get an embroidery hoop (not expensive...a few dollars max) to keep it from buckling (you want to keep both the applique' and the fabric beneath it as flat as possible). You will also want a thimble as most of them have an iron-on backing that can be tough to stitch through. And don't try to just use the iron-on backing...it tends to be crappy and peel off.
posted by sexyrobot at 7:26 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm with Miko. If there's one thing I've learned in my 48 years, it's that seemingly simple things done by first-timers are always a lot harder than you expect, and the results never what you might hope for. Don't try something like this for a dress you're going to be extensively photographed in, and the center of attention all day. Even something like doing iron-on pre-embroidered pieces will be a lot harder than you expect in terms of placing them symmetrically, for instance. Either buy a dress that has the style you like, or find an experienced seamstress or tailor who can make the modifications for you.
posted by not that girl at 7:34 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

Dude, do not risk your wedding dress. This stuff tends to be tricky and uncooperative at the best of times. Plus, applique is a pain in the ass. At the very least, practise on a non-wedding-dress first.
posted by windykites at 7:51 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm a fairly experienced sewer and I would NOT try this myself, at all. Pay someone--it's a wedding dress and fancy material.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how much it would cost a professional-- if you have a storebought dress and pay someone to sew things on, I'd guess it's cheaper than getting a custom dress, though.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:03 PM on November 27, 2013

please don't do this yourself. trust me that you will not get the appliques on correctly the first try and then you will have holes & possibly pulled threads in the fabric where you had to remove them. not what you want on your wedding gown. hire a professional.
posted by wildflower at 8:27 PM on November 27, 2013

Response by poster: A consensus seems to have been quickly reached that this is no job for a newbie. For what it's worth, even if I were to go to a professional I wouldn't request anything as complex as the dresses I've linked. Thanks for the input, everyone. And if anyone has any guess as to what it would cost to have someone add appliques to a store-bought gown, I'd still love to know.
posted by Rora at 8:48 PM on November 27, 2013

Since embroidering and constructing clothes are two related but very different skills, it might be a little hard to find a tailor who does that sort of work for levels of complexity beyond adding varsity letters to jackets. Your best bet is to go to local needlework shops and ask, they often have networks of local sewists who take paid work.

However. If you want appliques you will probably have to buy them specially online, as appliques as local stores will mostly be stuff suitable for kids and denim jackets. And fine embroidery and embellishment is expensive because it is skilled and it is slow. Hand embroidered traditional baptismal gowns for infants (with lace insertions) start at around $500, of which $100 to $200 is the materials, the rest is labor. Scale up accordingly for the size and complexity of an adult gown.

A keyword you might try searching for is "heirloom sewing." It is mostly very Victorian, white-on-white stuff, but that's probably the skill set you're looking for in an embroiderer (and the same techniques can be executed in colors and modern patterns).
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:19 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]

The problem is that the seamstress would have to know the exact fabric and the appliques to know the answer.

Depending on the style of your dress, you could maybe work with someone on etsy who does embroidery and then send them the dress or fabric and see what they say. I did this with my wedding dress and it worked out really well. However, my dress was blue shantung silk, which is very sturdy. The embroidery worked out perfectly but even if it hadn't, the dress had enough fullness that it could have been fiddled with. And even if it didn't look perfect, I was prepared to call it dammit and wear it anyway, unless it trashed the fabric. And the embroidery cost $400 when all was said and done (even machine embroidery takes a lot of time and thread, plus the embroiderer has to make some money).

With all those caveats, I was very happy with the end results and would do it again. except I'd intended to wear a light corset underneath, and then never did, so slouched the whole day and the front of the dress ended up with horizontal wrinkles in the pictures
posted by small_ruminant at 9:38 PM on November 27, 2013

Would one of those smart sewing machines you can design your own embroidery in or use stock images ones work for you. I don't know a lot about them I have just seen the machines on shopping sites in passing. Maybe some one on here would know more about them. They aren't super cheap but cheaper than a fancy wedding dress and it is sale season.
posted by wwax at 3:52 AM on November 28, 2013

May I point out that you will need a huge work table to spread out the gown and leave it in place as you progress along if you DIY, and hours and hours of time... Like maybe 100's of hours. Maybe shop alternatives on resale sites. If you are deadset on something like this, perhaps you could find sheer embroidered fabric at a high-end fabric store, then find a seamstress to have your sheer fabric overlaid on top of a plain gown (like sleeves or bodice or skirt). That may prove to be worlds more economical than hiring someone to hand-embroider or DIY.
posted by Lornalulu at 4:48 AM on November 28, 2013

Best answer: If you haven't tried it, you might get lucky at a dress shop that carries pageant wear? If you aren't sure which it it, ask your femme-est local friend for a rec (sometimes they also do bridal, sometimes not).

Of the stuff you linked, the Claire Pettibone one with the overskirt attached at the waist seam is going to be the easiest mod to a plain dress - look around online for fabrics that would work for the overskirt - elaborately printed sheer fabric already embellished with embroidery / beads is something I've seen at fabric stores with special occasion sections. If there's a good sized city nearby, you may be able to shop in person at a fashion fabric store. I'd take pictures and descriptions of the dress and the fabric to your dressmaker beforehand to ensure it's feasible.

Don't mess around with trying to use an embroidery machine yourself. Go to a professional.
posted by momus_window at 5:48 AM on November 28, 2013

Another suggestion would be to find some beautiful embroidered tulle or silk fabric (look for fabric stores that sell bridal or evening fabric) and have that made into a dress. Making a dress with a tulle overlayer isn't super simple, but it's a lot easier/less expensive than embroidering a dress, especially if the underlying structure is relatively simple, or you could incorporate an embroidered silk into the bodice or a panel of the skirt.
posted by The Elusive Architeuthis at 5:56 AM on November 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Another thought is that if you work with a machine embroiderer (through Etsy or the local needlework guild) you could have appliqués made to your own specifications onto a lightweight stabilizer rather than iron-on backing. Machine embroiderery uses digital patterns but have wide leeway over color, mixing patterns, etc, so if it turned out that you needed exactly 13 1.5" flowers in a particular shade of blue for the bodice and then some bigger ones in darker blue for a skirt, you could do that. Then you would need someone else to sew them on for you.
posted by The Elusive Architeuthis at 6:10 AM on November 28, 2013

I came to also suggest adding embroidered tulle to an existing dress. A tailor/seamstress will probably find that job a lot more doable. You can find some really pretty ones on Ebay. Adding it to the shoulders wouldn't be too hard, and it's be pretty similar to the dress you have in your first link. Good luck, and post a final update after it's done!
posted by FirstMateKate at 10:12 AM on November 28, 2013

Response by poster: Hey everyone, thanks to all for: a) the reality check and b) all the great info on tailoring and embroidery. I really appreciate everyone's input. (Oh, and thanks also for making me realize exactly *why* these kinds of dresses are so damned expensive.)
posted by Rora at 4:22 PM on November 29, 2013