Photography by Morgan Kay Photo
Karina found her dream wedding dress at a sample sale. She absolutely fell in love with this dress, but it was not in her size and couldn’t order the right size because it was unfortunately discontinued. Here’s where the Becoming Bridal team comes into the equation! If this sounds familiar to you, this situation also happened with Kelly’s dress too. Everyone should know by now that we always want to help our fellow curvy girls out in situations like this when we can!
When Karina contacted us she told us right off the bat that the dress was too small and that it had some pretty significant damage, which is not at all uncommon when also buying a sample dress. This shouldn’t dissuade other brides from purchasing a sample dress but they should be prepared for the cost that goes with fixing the damage, which will vary based on the individual dress and amount of damage. Fixing extensive damage also may require some design changes. It is also extremely important to be honest in advance with your seamstress about the state of the dress. With Karina’s dress, there were many holes in the tulle and lace, missing buttons on the back of the dress, as well as significant missing beading.
Besides fixing all of the damage the main alteration needed on Karina’s dress was the resizing. She was very petite while also being a curvy goddess and the dress was much too long for her. We let out the dress as much as possible and then made a small gusset across her hips to allow more room. What is a gusset? A gusset is a piece of material a seamstress will add in to enlarge a garment.
Here Bea and Laura are working on the waist of the dress
To make the dress fit Karina’s proportions we took in the bust to her size.
Here you can see one area where the bust is being taken in.
We also added a modesty panel, so it wasn’t as low cut as the original design.
Before modesty panel
The modesty panel in progress.
Because Karina was so petite we had to hem the dress a significant amount! The amount we shortened the dress allowed us the material needed to create the gussets and modesty panel with perfectly matching material. The top layer of her dress had lace appliques that adorned the bottom of the dress. Because of Karina’s small frame and the amount we hemmed it, adding all of these appliques back to the bottom would have made the design look too crowded. This allowed us the perfect opportunity to use these appliques in other areas of the dress to cover some of the damage on the dress! Isn’t it wonderful when a project works out perfectly like this?! The extra appliques also were used to cover the gussets and for the modesty panel! It worked out so perfectly it's hard to not think it was fated to end up this way.
We needed to shorten the waist of the dress all the way around to the back of the dress.
You can see here where the dress is being shortened at the waist
This brought the back waistline to a more complimentary spot on Karina’s frame. Shortening the waist was a real challenge because of the original crisscross pattern design feature on the front of the dress. We had to make it look like we didn’t take a big chunk out of it when we actually did!
We also customized her straps to be off the shoulder to create a more romantic-looking neckline.
This is during the strap alteration.
When we took in the bust we harvested extra lace and beads. Any of the large holes not covered by appliques were fixed by using the lace and beads from there! The re-beading and repair done on this dress were seriously extensive. Taking in the bust gave us many extra beads to use in the repair process.
The beading covered much of the dress.
Because Karina’s train was so long and she was so petite it required 11 bustle points to be able to tuck up her long train. The average traditional bustle is only 5-7 points so this was a lot!
That is a big train! We struggled to stretch it all the way out to work on it!
Morgan Kay Photo
Here is Karina’s bridesmaids doing up her train on her big day.
In the end after all of that repair and re-beading, Karina looked positively radiant!
Morgan Kay Photo
You would never be able to tell that this was originally a damaged sample dress that was too small! One of the most overwhelmingly satisfying parts of our job is transforming a dress like this for someone as sweet and kind as Karina. Karina saw through the damage and size to see something really special in this gown. The Becoming Bridal team could see its beautiful potential and were so happy to make Karina’s dream dress shine!
Photography by Morgan Kay Photo
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