You all recognize that first dress: the wedding dress I made this year for a friend of my niece. She came to me because she knew that I had made a Renaissance wedding dress for my niece and that I would not be afraid to try another. She wanted a much simpler dress than the one I had made before, but she did want the same sleeves.
Next is the picture of my niece in her wedding dress. (Yes, the shift under there should have been pulled down further to look authentic, but I wasn't there when they dressed her for the picture!) She had asked for a Renaissance style wedding dress and so I designed one.
I made a very simple charmeuse shift style top and skirt to go under the more elaborate bodice. The bodice I designed with princess lines and a basque waist to fit over a gathered skirt, both made from a very interesting piece of fabric. The bodice had long, wide sleeves that arched over the elbow in front in order to show off the long charmeuse sleeves on the under shift and hung down longer than her fingertips in back. And the sleeves were embellished the same as the front of the bodice with pearl roping and beading on either side of organza ruching.
The fabric for the bodice and skirt had been given to me by a dear friend. Her daughter had found a bolt of creamy off-white shantung that her grandmother had gotten from her cousin who lived in North Carolina and had bought the bolt of fabric at a garage sale. She had just enough left over for me to have it for this wedding dress and she wanted my niece to have it.
I carefully cut out the bodice and the sleeves (each of which took a little more than a yard); but when I began to cut out the skirt with train, I discovered that I lacked enough fabric to make one side of the back skirt. What was I going to do? The entire dress had been cut out and yet ..... I made a flying trip to Dallas to the various fabric outlets there (Flying is right. At the time, we were living 250 miles from Dallas and I had one day to find what I could find and drive back.)
I had no idea of what I would find. We walked into the first outlet store on Harry Hines and saw table after table of fabric filling a warehouse. I took the 15 inch square I had brought with me to match and headed for a section in the back labled "wedding" or "formal" or something that sent me back there. And there it was: a roll of fabric that looked exactly like the fabric I had in my hand. I unrolled a yard of it, tossed my scrap down on top of it and walked away. When I turned around, it wasn't there. It had blended totally into the fabric on the bolt. As far as I could tell or anyone who saw the dress could tell, the fabrics were exact, even though one was probably 15 to 20 years older than the other.
Anyway, the dress was a fairly common Renaissance design, but the headpiece which I put with it really didn't belong with that style of dress. But that was the headpiece that I wanted for her face and hair. It was a crescent shape much like the ones seen worn by Anne Boleyn and others from the mid 1500's. Besides, I didn't want to cut that beautiful piece of Alyncon lace. Instead I put lace and pearls around the edges and let it fall over her dark hair. I really liked that headpiece. It was embellished with handmade silk organza roses which my mother had made for my wedding dress forty years before as well as the pearls and ruched organza from the bodice and sleeves.
The combination was lovely, I thought; and apparently, so did someone else. A year or two later, I walked into a bookstore and saw the cover of Renaissance magazine. There on the cover was a beautiful bride wearing a Renaissance wedding dress, a duplicate of the one my niece had worn right down to the headpiece. I was delightfully surprised when I opened the magazine and saw that the cover dress was a Simplicity pattern. Of course, the pattern was simplified, no princess seams, no basque waist; but the look was the same and the combination with that particular headpiece was a real kick.
Of course, it could have been "just one of those things." I don't really care. I just thought it was a hoot that my design had made it to a magazine cover.
If you would like to see that magazine cover, go to
http://www.renaissancemagazine.com/backissues/issue21.html
and see whther you think they are that similar. As I said, the dress design is common, but the headpiece goes with an entirely different style dress. The embellishment on their dress is also similar to the one I made as is the arrangement of the two necklaces. And btw, their photograph of the dress is better than mine! And they pulled the shift top down into the right place. Oh well .....
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