Some of the flower girls proceeding to the wedding. Where are their bows?!
After seeing Wives and Daughters while I was in college, I decided that young Molly's dress in the opening scenes would be an ideal flower-girl dress. (There's an image or two way down the page at earthlydelights.com.au.) I was thrilled a couple of years later when Sense and Sensibility Patterns introduced a girls' regency dress pattern. As my mom and I started hashing out wedding details in maybe November or so, she volunteered to sew the dresses for our five flower girls, and I ordered said pattern.
The next step was to find dotted Swiss, and it was a bit harder than I'd expected! We looked, and then asked, at Joann's, and they told us to come back when the Spring fabrics were out. In February or so, we looked again, but didn't find a fine dotted Swiss among all the eyelets they had to offer.
Snow days are just as wonderful as a teacher as they were as a student! On more than one such day, Mom and I took the opportunity to drive to the Albany area to work on wedding stuff. I'd gotten a lead about an independent fabric shop in Latham, and we drove up and down Route 5 in search of it. We didn't find exactly what we were looking for, but we did find an upholstery shop . . . which was closed. We returned on another day to browse samples of lightweight curtain fabric which was almost what we were looking for.
Finally, we found the last, lone Alfred's in Albany which had one last, lone bolt of dotted Swiss! The man (Mr. Alfred?) told us dotted Swiss was not commonly manufactured anymore, maybe because of asbestos concerns--I don't remember details. But we were very excited and thankful to find it. Mom bought nearly the whole bolt.
The only problem was that it was white and my dress was ivory. I definitely didn't want to appear as if I wasn't wearing white on my own wedding day. But the dotted Swiss itself was very sheer, actually a bit dressier than the soft cotton I'd been expecting, and we chose a nice champagne lining which ended up working out beautifully.
Mom was a bit hesitant to cut into our precious fabric and decided to try the pattern out first. She found a gorgeous burgundy taffeta full-length ladies' skirt at a consignment shop and cut it up for a trial dress. She made it to fit our little niece as a Valentine's Day dress, and with a black velvet ribbon at the empire waist, it was a darling! I do wish we had a picture of it. With new-found confidence in that great little pattern, Mom started sewing away . . . and all their little dresses were just as precious as could be. :-)
I had pictured bare-legged little nymphs with wreaths in their curls, and one of my aunts suggested that they all wear ballet slippers. Perfect.
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