3 Tips for Sewing a Wedding Dress on a Budget

Sewing your own wedding dress is a great sewing experience for an amateur seamstress, but it is also an opportunity to save money. Custom-made designer dresses represent a big budget, so sewing your own dress can be an opportunity to get a custom creation at a lower cost.

But it's not guaranteed! Because between the cost of the fabrics, the large lengths of a wedding dress and the creation process made up of many iterations, the bill can still be significant in the end.

I'm sharing with you some keys to making the creation of your dreams come true while controlling your budget.

1. Optimize your creative process

• Explore patterns you have already sewn and start working from those. This will save you time searching for the perfect pattern and sewing versions that don't work for you.
• You will have to sew several toiles before moving on to your final dress. This is a lot of fabric yardage, so you have to include it in your budget. Find old sheets or reuse your scraps for a "patchwork toile". But above all, be careful not to choose fabrics of too poor quality so as not to slow down the progress of your project.

2. Reduce the footage of your project

• Choose models that use little fabric. For example, a circle skirt with a train requires 6m30 of fabric to be multiplied by two for a lined dress. Half-circle or ¼ circle skirts will therefore be more appropriate to reduce the footage of your project.
• In the same area, reduce the length of the train and you will gain precious centimeters of fabric.
• Recalculate your cutting plan to optimize it as much as possible! Cutting plans are often calculated for the largest size and a standard width of fabric. It is therefore generally possible to adapt it for your project and therefore optimize the footage.

3. Choose cheaper fabrics

• Wedding dresses are not necessarily made of silk. Even some designers offer dresses in viscose, acetate or polyester. The important thing is to find one with a good quality/price ratio and the drape you are looking for.

• It is often the lace that will represent a significant cost for a wedding dress, so work there rather in braid or border, rather than in large yoke. Also think about tulle which will allow you to work areas in transparency but at a reduced price.

♡

The ebook "My wedding dress, tips and techniques for sewing your exceptional dress" is three years old. To celebrate this anniversary, I have just enriched it with new techniques and a ^4th practical case that I show you in photos below. I show the behind the scenes of the making of this wedding dress, the techniques and finishes used to sew it.

For this model, I also challenged myself to sew at a low price. Of course, everything can always be optimized and will depend on your project, but this is an example to help you tame the budget that sewing a wedding dress represents.

Here is the budget for making this wedding dress. The supplies were purchased from Stragier and Rascol.

Customizable patterns Atelier Charlotte Auzou

Supplies

The cost of the creative process (canvases, pattern printing, threads, etc.) must also be added to this budget.