I have always been into repurposing old things and creating something new out of the old. I am a firm believer in putting the earth first, because if the earth is happy, everything that populates it, including us humans, will be happy, if the earth is healthy, we will be healthy, and if the earth is full of natural wealth, we will be wealthy. As a kid, I loved rummaging through my mum's old clothes looking for unwanted clothes, anything out of fashion, or too unwearable, I would recycle them into a new garment, and therefore making them in fashion once again. Until I was a teenager, every summer I spent it living at my grandparent's farm house in a little village in Salamanca, being feral and free. My granny had a very old hand-crank Singer sewing machine that she didn't even know how to use and I would take over it and make it mine every summer. Some of my aunties and uncles still lived at my grandparent's home and I remember making my aunties bikinis to wear at the river when we went for a picnic, which they happily wore (looking back now, I bet they weren't made very well and they were made out of old curtains but they loved them anyway), and I made myself costumes to play with my friends. My grandparent's massive attic full of old furniture, and old blanket boxes full of old clothes was a paradise to me. And since in Spain everyone sleeps siesta religiously in the summer afternoons, when the sun is up and it is so hot you can not even go outside, and I personally don't enjoy sleeping in the day time, I would spend siesta time in the attic looking for hidden gems to recycle. My unties were teenagers in the 1960's so most of the clothes I dug out up there were 1960's going-out dresses and shoes, but that was enough to make me dream of ballgowns and princesses so I would just cut here and there, add a train, and voilá! that was a couture gown made in a day! Magic!
As I grew up, I never stopped repurposing old clothes into new fashion garments, from jeans taken apart and turned into backpacks when I was a teenager, to recycling big truck tyres into corsets, bags and spiky belts that I sold at a stall in teknivals around Europe and at a stall I shared with two other friends at Affleck's Palace in Manchester, in the 90's: "Goma", which means "rubber" in Spanish, referring to recycled tyre pieces. I have also taught fashion recycling for years at the Junk shop in Manchester as well as the Manchester Arts & Crafts Centre and at workshops within music festivals in Europe, promoting the use of materials that are already there, don't need to be produced, and would end up in landfill otherwise. So yes, I am a lover of recycling and showing other people how to do the same. And, an added bonus is, the creativity that sparkles in your brain when you have to use something that is already there, is a thrill!
Go past all the memories of recycling clothes, and I am a grown-up who actually designs clothes for a living, but who keeps going to the charity shops looking for interesting clothes that don't fit or that are not something I would wear, but I like the fabric, and the details like the pockets or the collar, and I buy it and then I turn it into something that fits me and that I can wear, and that is one of my passions, even when I have way too many clothes and not enough days in my life to wear them all but that's OK...it is a hobby that doesn't harm the environment and it is cheap and so much fun! That is me. If you spot something I wear and you think is cool and different, I have probably Frankensteined it up from something else, many times from more than one garment....
So, when Paula contacted me to talk about making her wedding dress, from an existing old garment she has a sentimental attachment with, it felt like it had my name all over it, and I agreed to make it for her. Paula's dad she loved dearly and unfortunately had passed away many years ago, but when he was still alive, he gave Paula a lovely summer dress as a present and every time she wore the dress after her dad had passed, it reminded her of him and of how much she loved him. So she wanted to marry her fiancé in that dress to also feel her dad's presence at the wedding. The dress her dad gave her was a very simple asymmetric ivory satin dress with sheer panels, and thin straps that went around the back of her neck, as you can see in the picture, and we tried to keep as much of it as possible, integrating it into her new wedding dress.
Paula wanted her wedding dress to be sheer as well and to have 3D lace flowers scattered on it, with a full long floaty skirt. So we came up with the idea of using a sheer bridal tulle as an overlay over the existing dress and add the lace flowers, of different sizes and shapes, on it. I drew a few different sketches with ideas for her dress and she picked one of them, and here it is the sketch I did for that design.
Paula's old dress was then cut in half at waist level and the top was used to create the underlay of the front of her wedding dress, which then I covered in a very fine transparent tulle fabric with a different shape to the underlay, so as to frame the old dress with it. I also made almost-invisible tulle sleeves for it, and the skirt of the old dress was used as the underlay base for the bottom part of the dress, as a mini-skirt, which was also covered by a full floaty tulle skirt that was long to the floor, and I left the edges of the tulle fabric raw, so they were light and sheer.
Once the dress was created, we looked for lace flowers to scatter on it, and I found a lovely French guipure cotton lace with slightly retro-looking daisies and leaves and swirls that came as a whole piece of lace, and I cut out each motif from the lace one by one, hundreds of them actually, very carefully using tiny embroidery scissors. These were then placed randomly (*artistically) over the
whole dress, as if a big bunch of flowers and leaves had been thrown over it everywhere.
I stitched each flower and each leaf and each swirl by hand over the transparent tulle dress.
Here there are some pictures I took of the dress in my studio, on a mannequin. It looks better on Paula though!
I absolutely love the outcome and it is undoubtedly one of my favourite makes, I loved making it knowing that it would be of high sentiment value to Paula, and that she will cherish it forever. So thank you Paula for giving me the opportunity to do what I love the most and for trusting me with your valuable possession. The pictures of you in your beautiful dress at your wedding are amazing!
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