Magpie Tidings: Making my own Wedding Dress

So much has happened since I last posted on this blog, the most obvious being Covid. We all know how that has changed everyone's lives, I don't need to write any more about that! At first I was using Covid as an excuse to not keep up on my blog, but lately I've been feeling the itch to revive it and so here we are.

Last year, in May, I moved from living with my mother in Utah, to totally living on my own (something I've never experienced before) in Rexburg, Idaho. I found a part-time job at the local museum (The Museum of Rexburg), and then, on September 18th, I got married! Both of these have been significant and exciting shifts in my life.

I was going to wear an antique dress from the 1910s, but decided to make my own dress instead. I used a pattern from around 1938 or 1939 that I've used before for two different dresses. I have previous posts detailing these dresses: Late 1930s dress and the Darby O'Gill dress I re-created. I used this pattern because I knew it worked well and I was comfortable with it. I used the long sleeve option and lengthened the skirt as well. I also worked with real silk, something I've been too shy of doing before this. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it was to work with.

Years ago, even before Nick & I were dating, I bought a pair of American Duchess shoes on sale. I was determined that I'd be married in these shoes. So, when I was picking out the silk for my dress, I matched it to the flowers in the silk panel on the side of the shoes. It was a perfect match.

A progress image - the bodice pinned to the skirt.

My husband Nick and I got engaged in March, and then I moved to Rexburg in May. He would come up to visit and work during the summer, and then we were married in September out in the desert in a beautiful location. A friend of ours years ago had built a labyrinth, based of the one in Chartres Cathedral, and this was the location of our wedding.

The finished dress, right before driving out to the desert.

Out in the beautiful desert. You can see my American Duchess shoes in this photo too.

Nick and me on our wedding day.

It was a semi-elopement, but some of our friends and a few of my siblings came for the wedding.

Our friend Scott Samuelson. He designed and built the labyrinth and talked about the history of the labyrinth, as well as reading an epithalamion -- a wedding poem -- that he'd written just for us.