A moment that changed me: I made my own wedding dress – and learned to embrace imperfection | Weddings

They say it’s bad luck to make your own wedding dress. They say the same about receiving knives as gifts, brides wearing pearls, or getting married on the Sabbath. So much of wedding culture is built on fear. But wearing my homemade wedding dress was a moment of courage.

I was underqualified to do so. I hadn’t made a proper garment since my GCSE textiles classes. But I knew the basics, I could read a pattern and I could be very persistent. In the end I decided to go ahead because I enjoyed sewing and thought that if I put in the time I would probably be able to do it.

I was anxious to begin with. There would be weeks when I was paralyzed with fear of getting it wrong. A sloppy cut and a full bodice needs reworking; get the measurements wrong and things go back to square one; and make something that just looks bad and I’ve wasted my opportunity to wear it dress of your life. In the end, I had to say to myself, “Do it imperfectly or don’t do it at all.”

I spent nine months working on it. On the living room floor, I cut six meters of soft satin fabric, unrolling sections at a time, draping the remainder over the top of the sofa and crawling around on my hands and knees to follow the curves of the pattern.

I would post pictures and ask for advice on sewing forums (and then quickly delete the posts from self-preservation when users chastised me for attempting such a thing with so little experience). I couldn’t get the zipper all the way up, so I asked my husband-to-be to hold out his arms and keep his eyes closed while I pressed myself against him so he could pull the zipper up – it was superstition I hugged her playfully.

One day my cat clawed the dress forward while it was hanging on a mannequin. Fortunately, this was on the trial version made of cotton, but the final design did not escape customization. On the right side, a few centimeters below the neckline, there is a small red dot. A month before the wedding, when I was sliding a stitch ripper through a dart, I missed the stitch and poked the blade through the top layer of skin on my finger, causing some bleeding. Maybe if the bloodstain had been bigger I would have been upset, but this late in the game I embraced it as proof of the journey I had been on to make it.

Every inch of this dress was run through my fingers. Irregular stitches happened when I had a lapse of concentration: straight stitches went off course because the mail had arrived, my phone rang, or I called out my tea order through a closed door. The skirt was made of almost four meters of slippery, delicate fabric, so I hand-stitched the hem while sitting on the couch late into the night.

When it was finished, two weeks before the wedding, the dress sat behind my desk on a mannequin, hidden under a double sheet. To the experienced eye, it was riddled with errors. But I forced mine to see the bigger picture.

We often talk about how finding your wedding dress is like finding your soul mate – “the one” is out there, waiting for you to try it on by chance and fall in love. Making my own wedding dress taught me that there is more to love than fate. The process of creating beauty, love and meaning, piece by piece, stitch by stitch, but with a purpose and a vision has been incredibly rewarding. I walked fearlessly down the aisle in my homemade dress.

But I also felt vulnerable. All my positive qualities were sewn into this dress: my vision, determination and resourcefulness. But I also had my flaws: impulsiveness, stubbornness, and self-critical nature. Choosing to wear it was a lesson in the transformative value of embodying your whole true self.

After months of zipping with my eyes closed, my husband adored the dress when he finally saw it, as did friends and family who encouraged me throughout the process. Seeing through the eyes of others confirmed the things I had begun to feel. I felt proud and honest.

Five minutes after sitting down to lunch, I spilled red wine down the front of my dress. The stain won’t come out, but I don’t mind. It was another sign of a joyful day and a final reminder to accept and celebrate that life isn’t always perfect.