Where The Greatest Honour Lies

When my best friend got married a few years ago, I knew I would not get to be her bridesmaid. Although we'd not grown apart in any way since leaving school, she'd seen less of me than our other best friend, and she also had an older sister with two young children. So the posts of two grown up bridesmaids, one flower girl and page boy were all well and truly spoken for.

I was a little sad – I've always wanted to be a 'grown up' bridesmaid, ever since having been a flower girl in the 1980s in a nice lilac and lace cotton job – but I was not heart broken as I knew my part in this wedding lay elsewhere.

Intelligence v Common Sense – a No Brainer?

Now, I am the first to admit that I'm no Brain of Britain. My eyes cloud over with confused fog should someone attempt to explain the finer complexities of the internal combustion engine, there are menus on my digi box that will forever remain a mystery to me, and I have long maintained that I hit my academic peak when I passed the entrance exam to gain my place at private girls' school, aged 11.

I'm not however a complete numpty either. I did manage to stay the course at the private girls' school and left at the end of the 6th form with 8 GSCEs and 3 A-levels under my belt. I've run my own business since I was 19, I know the difference between there, they're and their, and I'm rather good at Sudoku. I've always worked in very customer facing environments and have met all sorts of people from all walks of life. I therefore believe that I am qualified enough to make the following statement, based on a lifetime's worth of observation....

Bridesmaids: Tips For and About!

Six or seven weeks back I was asked by a Bridal Magazine to write down my top 5 tips on dressing your bridesmaids for an upcoming feature about... well... dressing your bridesmaids.  Feeling hugely excited just to have been asked to do such a thing by a real and proper mag that people I've never met before can buy from real and proper shops, I set about the task with great enthusiasm, so much so that I came up with dozens of top tips and then had to spend three days trying to whittle it down to just the five.

Yesterday I popped into WHSmiths on my way home from working at The Makery in Bath, just on the off chance, to see if the relevant issue of the Wedding Mag was out yet and whether or not they had used what I sent them.

The Odd Sock Dilemma

In my house, I have a radiator that is the designated Odd Sock Meeting Point. Every sock that emerges from the washing without its friend gets hung on this radiator to await the arrival of its other half.

Every person in my house has two feet, and, each of us being able to keep both sides of our bodies at roughly the same temperature, we generally speaking wear our socks in even numbers. There may be days in the winter when one person may be found to be wearing more than one pair of socks at once, but on investigation, that person will still be found to have distributed the multiple socks in an even fashion; ie, two or three socks on each foot, each foot wearing the same number of socks.

Customers Are Psychic

In my garage, I have a stack of good old Ikea little wooden drawer box things, each drawer containing various different bits of ready made stock left over from when I was doing Craft Fairs with Pretty Things. Only the basic items – hair slides, some necklaces, fairies. Just the things I can always be sure of selling.

Of the millions and millions of beads I keep
 in stock, I never have the ones I need

In my work room I have various different storage systems, all over flowing with every kind of glass and resin bead you could possibly imagine, as well as endless findings and other necessary bits and bobs in my magic cupboard of many things.

Yet somehow, despite all of these things, whenever I get an order for a Pretty Things item, it is absolutely always, without fail, for something that I not only do not happen have already made, I also do not have the bits to make it.

Dressmaking and the Art of Dragon Taming

More than most, the dressmaker is privy to all sorts of little secrets learned during the naturally intimate setting of the fittings; what the underwear looks like, where the hidden tattoo is, what special good luck charm has been sewn into the lining, what the bride really thinks of the best man, what the bridesmaids really think of their dresses. Over the years, these confidential and sometimes bizarre bits of information underline the fact that the seamstress not only must be a person that the bride and her family trust and feel comfy with, she also needs to be a professional diplomat.

But all this counts for nothing when compared to the one aspect of the job that can on occasions reduce even the most experienced to a jumble of terrified nerves. Dealing with dangerous equipment on a daily basis – high powered industrial motored sewing machines, over lockers with sharp moving blades, red hot irons and not forgetting the most lethal of all, the ironing board – does nothing to prepare for the fear that can strike the heart like the call of the potentially dangerous and volatile animal that so many brides bring with them to their fittings.

Magic Trick Hand Smoothing

If you are wearing silk, nothing more than the heat of your hand will take all crush marks and creases away.

This is a trick I picked up when I was the in house dressmaker at Radhika in Bristol.  As the person often called upon to advise clients on fabric choices, I quickly realised that I needed to be as good at selling silk as I was at cutting and sewing it.

Even 20 years on, people were still afraid of buying silk thanks to the lingering memory of Lady Diana Spencer as she got out of her carriage in her crumpled and creased wedding gown.  Logically, the size of the dress v. the size of the carriage somewhat indicated that crumpling was unavoidable, but nevertheless, it went into the nation's mind that silk was a bad thing for a wedding gown because it creased and crumpled and had you looking like a wrung out dishrag.

My Life in Wedding Dresses

Some time later this year I will be able to celebrate 20 years working in the wedding trade, helping brides design, choose and create their wedding gowns.

A very typical early 1990's style dress, with lace,
frills, big sleeves and hitched skirts.
Image courtesy of wedmagazine.co.uk

Flipping through my photo albums of the last two decades, it's always fascinating to see how fashions change from one extreme to another, with each new generation thinking they are the first ones ever to think of doing this with that.  But looking back, when I first started my training at the Green Room in Stoke Bishop, Bristol in 1991, the fashionable wedding dress was big and fluffy, with lace trims, layers and layers of net petticoats, ruched up skirts and flowers stuck on everywhere.  Compare that to today's on trend dresses - lace, large skirts with lots of net petticoats, ruched up skirts, and lots of lots of flowers - they suddenly don't sound so very different.  But when you put pictures of each side by side, it's amazing to see that they look so incredibly different when they are made up of exactly the same things.

Roses and Lace and All Things Girlie....

My strongest memories of my early days at The Green Room are of sitting at my little work table in the Bolloms concession that we ran in the other half of our shop unit, making endless silk roses.  With the greatest respect to Sylvia, who taught me absolutely everything I ever needed to know when it came to dressmaking, I hated making roses.  It was possibly the most boring job in the world next to hand stitching a hem and train of a large, full skirted, fluffy '90s style dress.

I Spy..... A Tree.

Yesterday was Mother's Day, and as Mother's Days go, I did fairly well out of it. From my two children I collectively received 5 cards, three presents, one picture, breakfast in bed and tea in a pub. Not bad.

Due to a laundry malfunction during the week (I forgot to do any), much of the day was spent stuffing assorted piles of clothes into the washing machine, taking them out again and then stuffing them into the tumble drier, so my husband's instructions as he shot out of the door for a three hour run to do lots of nothing didn't exactly get obeyed. But thanks to the wonders of modern machinery, I at least didn't spend the day crouched in the river with a rock and a bar of soap.

And to be fair, I did spend much of the day happily sat on the sofa with my cross stitch, trying really hard to watch some recorded episodes of The Event on my digi box while the kids played outside in the rain. My digi box seems to have something against The Event. It doesn't seem able to play it back without randomly switching from full colour, to black and white, to strobing flashes of colour and back again. It does this to no other program that it records. I've concluded it must be the aliens doing it as I can find no other explanation. Unfortunately this is not enough to stop from darting back and forth across the room to wiggle leads and hit things on the off chance that it might fix the problem.