Nice Day for a White Wedding

Part I:  Hit Me with the Inspiration Stick
 

So I have this fashion design degree (I have other degrees, but they're just the usual).  Which I don't use because I'm living my dream as a technical writer.  No, seriously, I may be the only person who was born to be a technical writer.  Anyway, I figured I might as well as use this degree for something, so I'm going to design my own wedding gown.  Actually, that is about the first question people ask me upon learning that I'm engaged:  "Are you going to design your own dress?"  Hell yeah!  Or I say, why yes, I am - I'm very excited.  It depends on who's asking.

Designing your own wedding gown can be daunting.  I was never that good at the pattern-drafting or the sewing bit, so I'll need to find someone to do all that for me.  (I welcome recommendations.)  I have a general idea of what I want, but as I troll the Internet for more inspiration, here is what I've come across.  Scratch that - I have a very good idea of what I want; it's just a matter of making it all work together.

Long Sleeved Beaded Taffeta Winter Wedding Dress

This is pretty much the dress I had envisioned...if I was still getting married in the fall as originally planned.  But it's going to be a beautiful spring wedding in Southern California.  And I'm going to have a lot of eyes on me, and that's going to make me hot.  Literally.

Aisle Be There Dress at Modcloth,
aka Trashy Diva Honey Dress

This dress is gorgeous - heavy creamy satin. 

I love Fifties-style dresses and Fifties-style dresses love me.  I plan to wear it for the rehearsal dinner.  Unless my design plan goes down in flames, in which case it will be my wedding dress.

Alexander McQueen Fall/Winter 2010
(picture from Fashionising.com)

This gown is so amazingly awesome, it renders me speechless.  My fiancé is afraid of my designing my own dress because this is precisely the dress he would expect me to come up with.  I'd lose the pantyhose skullcap, though.  The rest of the Alexander McQueen Fall 2010 collection is equally awe-inducing.

Vogue Pattern V8355

Look at that collar on Vogue pattern V8355.  Just look at it!

Left:  Telegraph.co.uk; Right:  Refinery29

I tend to avoid anything that is too popular - I'm not going to wear the same wedding dress as Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, just because she wore it.  Although it was quite beautiful.  But the dress her sister Pippa wore as her maid of honor is just perfect.  The silhouette, the cowl neck.  Looks like I'm jumping on Royal Wedding bandwagon after all.