Homemade Gift-O-Rama

For my mom.

My mom has made many wedding dresses over the years and never documented them. So I had the idea to scrounge up as many as I could so she could have a collection of all her work. It took a couple months to locate the brides and get the photos from them, but I'm glad she'll have all but one dress together in a book.

I made a similar book for my husband's parents for last Christmas that has more in depth steps if you are interested. I made this one similarly, but I didn't antique it with shoe polish and ripping pages.

The outside is covered with a scrap of satin left from my own wedding dress and the trim around the title is from my friend's wedding dress made in 2006.

I hacked out the pages of the text book between my pages and used the extracted paper to make each individual page...does that make sense? (I glued 3 or 4 pages together, then cut like 8 pages out of the binding with an exacto knife to give room in the binding for my additional pages. The paper cut out of the binding I spray painted to make the pages.)

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I decided to only attach the photos and background stuff to the page by sewing. So all the photos sketches, tissue patterns, lace, trim, was sewn to the paper and I even left some of the threads long hanging off the page.

I made each page and then glued it to the book. I didn't take pictures of the inside covers, but I made collages of sketches, patterns, photos and swatches and covered them with white net. So you can see stuff beneath the net, but not clearly. I guess in my mind it reminded me of a veil or something. Also, her three daughters wrote notes about her and what her sewing talents have meant/ contributed to our lives.



I think that is it that I can think of that went into this book. Except for one of the best things was the sketch. I was browsing through my Mom's old patterns of wedding dresses and found on one, a sketch she'd made. So I copied it to put in the book as a background piece and realized as I was going along that it was the sketch of her little sister's wedding gown. I was excited to have a copy of her actual sketch with the actual dress from the 1980s, and it just so happened the bridal photo is posed just as she sketched the dress. What a gem!!! It's the red page.

A huge thanks to all the brides who took the time to dig through their wedding albums and get their pictures to me. I really appreciate it!