Wedding Dress Diary: Silk and Tatting

I know I'm due for another update on The Dress, but I want to talk about The Veil real quick. I've actually had a vision in my head of my perfect bridal veil for a lot longer than I've had one of my dress. What I have always pictured is more or less... ok, exactly like this:

She just beat me to it.

I have a deep and abiding hatred for tulle, which was only sharpened and honed by working in bridal for a year and a half. So I was never planning on having a tulle veil. Once I started ordering samples of silk for my dress, I also started looking at various sheer silks for a veil. My favorite was the 3mm silk gauze from Dharma Trading. It's so light and floaty and gorgeous!

Of course, when I finally got around to ordering my veil supplies, I had misplaced my sample. So I ordered from memory, and accidentally got silk chiffon, which is not quite as sheer. Beautiful stuff, though. I decided to keep it to use for something else in the future, and re-ordered the gauze I meant to buy in the first place.

Here are the two fabrics side-by-side - gauze is on the left.

What to do with five yards of silk chiffon, though? I'll have to come up with something fabulous... (I bought way more fabric than I needed for my veil, but that was on purpose. I have a secret project in mind for the extra gauze.)

Now, a gorgeous fabric deserves gorgeous lace! Did I tell you guys that I learned to tat? Melissa Mead, an awesome co-worker of mine, taught me how back in September.

I was a little excited.

I was learning to tat so that I could make more of this lace:

These were scraps of lace left over from my mom's wedding dress and veil, tatted by my aunt and grandma back in 1980. I was originally planning to make enough lace to edge my veil.

Then a few days later, Melissa surprised me by giving me 2+ yards of silk tatted lace!

I was floored when she told me it was for me! I decided to use this lace for my veil, and use the scraps of my mom's lace for the edging of my handkerchief. More on that later. :)

I wanted to make more of this gorgeous silk lace, so I ordered some matching silk thread on etsy. While I waited for it to arrive, I practiced the pattern on some fine cotton thread that was conveniently already wound on one of the tatting shuttles that I inherited from my grandma.

When my gorgeous silk thread arrived, it was a bit of a learning curve. The knots slid along the thread beautifully, but it also knotted much tighter than I was used to. But eventually I got the hang of it.