A Tale of Two Pillows, Part 2: A Wedding Anniversary Gift For One of My Brides

My last post was about the first pillow I ever made. This post is about the last pillow that I made (perhaps latest is the better word to use, since I’m sure I’ll make more in the future). It also involves a mother—this time not mine, but one of my brides’— as well as a surprise gift: a first wedding anniversary gift for her daughter. And, thankfully, the craftsmanship of this pillow is markedly improved over the first one!

Cecilia, my bride’s mother, got in touch with me around the holidays wondering if I could make a pillow with the same frogs I had made on her daughter Sarah’s wedding dress. Her first wedding anniversary was approaching and she wanted to surprise her daughter with a special gift and thought this would be something unique that her daughter would really appreciate.

They had all loved the wedding gown I made the year before, especially the front frog closure on the jacket which referenced their Chinese heritage from the mother’s side of the family. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tangible reminder of that element of the gown, instead of just photos or having to take the dress out of a box to see?

I thought it was a great idea, and was flattered to be looped into another important milestone in this wonderful family’s life. This is what I love about my job: that I get to do this thing that I absolutely love to do which creates something with so much meaning and significance for my clients and their families.

I happened to have enough fabric left over from making her dress that I could do it, so I got to work, replicating the frogs and ball button closure that I had initially created for the front of the jacket that went with the wedding gown, this time, for the front of a pillow.

When designing the original gown (which I’ll devote an entire post to in the future—for now I’ll just stick to the frog parts) I researched Chinese knots and chose a good luck knot to recreate in the same Italian silk duchess satin as I made the rest of the gown. The button is a monkey’s fist knot.

The whole point of this pillow was to have the exact frog closure on the pillow as the wedding dress, but as I was making the pillow I got carried away, thinking of all the even more complex and elaborate frogs I could make; I had to restrain myself! There now exists in my head an entire suite of frog embellished couture throw pillows! I started daydreaming of all the other pillows I could make, inspired by all my other brides’ dresses. I loved this project and hope to make more wedding gown inspired pillows for my brides, whether as a reminder of their wedding gown, or ring pillows for the ceremony.

If you’re one of my past brides and you’d like a keepsake pillow made with the leftovers of your fabric, or if you’re a future bride and you like the idea of a ring pillow made made to match or compliment your dress, let me know!

Mother’s Day Tribute: A Tale of Two Pillows, Part 1.

Last Christmas was the best Christmas ever; not only because I got to decorate like a fiend, but because while I was home I finally found—after a fruitless eighteen year search!—a bunch of things I had sewn when I was a child and teenager that I’d long worried had been accidentally thrown away. I burst into happy tears when I pulled this from a box and held it for the first time in probably more than 20 years.

It’s a pillow I made as a Mother’s Day gift for my mom when I very first started sewing. It was the first non-Barbie-clothes thing I ever made, and it is The Most Important Thing I Have Ever Sewn because it taught me the importance of craftsmanship and construction in relation to design.

I had secretly taught myself how to sew when I was 6 or 7 years old and once my mom realized I had been sewing on my own, and I had her real permission to use the sewing machine, I decided I would make her something special for Mother’s Day.

I put a lot of thought into the design, but even more heart; both literally and figuratively, as you can see! Limited by what fabric was available in the scrap drawer, I chose white felt, which was leftover from when my mom made me lamb’s ears to wear as a three year old when I was one of the stable animals in the Christmas party nativity scene; pink corduroy, from a pair of old pants I had grown out of; and denim that had most likely been my dad’s yard-work pants, or at least used to patch my dad’s yard-work pants, I’m not sure.

To stuff the pillow I used a bag of cotton balls that I had pilfered from the cabinet under my mom’s bathroom sink, because what else would you stuff a pillow with when you’re a little kid? The bag was half empty, though, so my pillow ended up being a little bit flat.

Sewing multiple layers of denim is a pretty ambitious task for anyone, let alone an 8 year old novice, but I wasn’t going to let my inexperience get in the way of making a sumptuously ruffled edge for my pillow. You can tell that I constructed the top and bottom ruffle first because, a) they’re sewn inside the seam, and b) there is actually some semblance of a ruffle; by the time I got to the vertical sides of the pillow I had run out of fabric and there was just barely enough to cover the last side, with not a single pleat and no folded edges to hide the frayed raw edges of the denim.

When I had it all finished I was so proud of this beautiful thing I had made to show my mom how much I loved her and I just knew she would love it too! She would think it was the best gift ever and be so proud of it and show it off to all of her friends.

I decided that the best way to give it to her would be to place it on her bed (where I was sure she would display it for the rest of her life!) so that when she walked into her bedroom she would see it and know that it was obviously a gift I had made for her. I waited anxiously all Mother’s Day for her eruption of surprise and gratitude, but it never came.

What did come, however, was the pillow— right back into my bedroom! My mom put it in there, assuming I had accidentally left it in her room, as if it was one of my toys I’d forgotten to clean up. I was devastated, and brought it back to her, telling her that this was my Mother’s Day gift and that I had made it for her to put on her bed.

I don’t think she really knew what to do at that point, and we are an honest bunch of people, my family, so she told me the cold hard truth:

“But Colette, it doesn’t match my bedroom.”

(SIDENOTE: In the mid 80’s my mom redecorated the main floor of our house with peach carpet, and peach everything everywhere, so of course this pink and blue pillow did not match, but Mom, that wasn’t the point!)

She also delicately tried to explain to me that my sewing and craftsmanship might not yet be good enough for permanent display. She had every right to make that call; the tailored wool jacket that she made in her university sewing class in 1965 was the most perfectly crafted thing the professor had seen in all her years of teaching (another blog post for another time), and Jane’s Peach Palace, as my parents’ house eventually came to be called by my older siblings, had certain aesthetic standards to uphold!

Now, if you’re worried that my mom is some sort of cold, unfeeling aesthete because my pink and blue pillow wasn’t good enough for her, to her credit, she kept a bouquet of tissue paper flowers (with bright green pipe cleaner stems!) I made for her, probably when I was even younger, in a vase on her bathroom vanity for years. Of course, the tissue paper was peach, though…

So the Freudian subtext of this story is that I’ve spent the rest of my life sewing maniacally to prove to my mother that I can make something worthy of her praise and adoration, but the more accurate take-away from this experience is that I learned at an early age that it’s not enough to have a great idea, or to be well intentioned in your creative endeavors—you also have to be able to execute your idea at the requisite level.

That is the bedrock principle of my design philosophy, creative process and aesthetic, and as devastating an experience as this was as a little girl—adding insult to injury, a few days later I heard my mom yelling out from her bedroom, “Where’d all my cotton balls go? Who took my cotton balls?” To which I, deflated, had to confess—it served a much greater purpose than if she had showered me with compliments and kept the pillow on her bed like I had hoped.

I love my mom and everything she’s done for me in my life. She’s my biggest fan and greatest champion, and I owe so much to the many wonderful things she’s taught me, the sacrifices she’s made for me and my four older siblings, and the constant love and support she provides for our family.

It’s impossible for me to look at this pillow all these years later and not smile at the earnestness with which I created it; every stitch reads like a journal entry to me of my best effort at the time. I love it and wouldn’t change any of its frayed, un-mitered corners for anything.

My 34th Birthday Cakes

I love using my birthday as an excuse to spend an inordinate amount of time making some kind of fancy/crazy/funny/delicious cake to share with my friends and family. I don’t do it every year because of how elaborately involved a process it always becomes, but the years when I’m able to I have so much fun!

I decided to throw myself a birthday party this year. I haven’t had one for a few years, and after renovating my apartment last year I never had a house re-warming party, so this introvert was long overdue to have some friends over for a celebration. The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out what kind of cake to make!

It would need to represent something relevant in my life or be personally significant in some way; that’s what makes the process fun for me. Like in 1998 when i made my 16th birthday cake with a silly fashion illustration of myself as a cartoon wearing an outfit I’d designed (but hadn’t yet made) out of fabric that I had just bought on my very first trip to New York with my home-ec sewing class that month…

Or in 2005, when I was obsessed with Napoleon Dynamite and made a Pile of Giant Tater-Tots cake (I baked yellow cake in tomato paste cans, covered them in yellow icing and tossed them in toasted coconut with yellow food dye) and wrote “Happy friggin’ birthday!” in icing “ketchup”…

I wanted this year’s cake to say something about me in the few years since I last made myself a birthday cake. The obvious idea was to do a renovation themed cake but my renovation involved a lot of sleek, high-gloss white cabinets, and a sleek, glossy white cake would be boring, and not enough of a creative challenge.

So I thought about making a cake version of Space Girl’s Jetpack (part of the Halloween costume I made for myself last year), but I couldn’t accurately recreate it without it being incredibly unappetizing, what with ALL THE GLITTER!

I was at a loss. My last idea was that I could make a baby animal cake, inspired by the drawings and paintings of baby safari animals I’ve made over the last few years for my now two-year-old nephew’s bedroom, but I wanted to do something a little more adult to go with my newly “grown-up” apartment!

A week before the party—after a fruitless brainstorming phone call with my out-of-state best friend— I went to bed, catastrophizing that I would have to cancel my birthday party on account of not being able to come up with a suitable birthday cake idea. But around 1 A.M. the inspiration hit, and I was wired until 4 A.M., mentally constructing the perfect birthday cake(s), amazed that the combination of frustration and sleep deprivation had conspired in my favor. Not only did I suddenly have a solution, but it incorporated all of my possible ideas!

Instead of my white, glossy cabinets, the inspiration I took from my renovation was the beautiful tone-on-tone silvery/pinky/grey zebra striped fabric that I had made curtains, throw pillows, and re-upholstered my chairs and bar stools with.

I would make two zebra striped cakes and each of them would have significance beyond the renovation. The first, a vanilla and chocolate zebra striped cake would recall the baby zebra I painted for my nephew.

And the second zebra striped cake would be strawberries and cream, with the pink strawberry stripes hinting at the pink from my Space Girl costume.

For weeks I’d had in mind two different back up desserts in the event that I never came up with a cake design. Serendipitously, those recipes were perfect for the technique I planned to use to articlulate the zebra stripes!

I had to alter the recipes quite a bit to get them to express my vision for the final cakes, but the original recipes I started with were both vintage Komm family favorites that I’ve long wanted to revise and turn into something new and luxurious. This added another layer of significance to my birthday cake project; with any of my creative projects, whether it’s someone’s wedding dress, a drawing, or a cake, having a meaningful back-story to the final creation makes it so worthwhile and immensely satisfying. Finding a connection to my inspiration is an inextricable component of my creative process; creativity can’t happen in a vacuum.

The frozen strawberries and cream cheese cake started with the recipe for what my family has always called “Favorite Dessert,” but a google search of the ingredients will tell you is actually called “frosty strawberry squares.” It’s a really fluffy frozen strawberry meringue with candied walnuts on the top and bottom. It’s delicious, but whenever I eat it I think how the best part is the candied nuts and there needs to be more of them. It’s also extremely airy—as in, not dense enough to turn into a “cake”—so I added a few ingredients, changed some of the ratios and made the strawberry meringue differently to turn it into a cheese cake while still keeping the distinct meringue-y taste of the original dessert. I added more flavor dimension by adding pecans to the walnuts, and—since it was a cheesecake—threw in a recipe of graham cracker crust to make the most delicious crumble that went between the strawberry and cream layers. OMG, it was soooooo good!

The chocolate zebra cake was a mousse cake. The recipe I started with is my own tweaked variation on “easy chocolate cream torte,” a recipe I found as a teenager and have made for all kinds of special occasions and birthdays. This time around I turned it into “complicated chocolate cream torte” (make that KOMM-plicated chocolate cream torte!). In its original form it’s alternate layers of chocolate mousse and giant chocolate cookies which soften between the mousse. This time I used more chocolate in the mousse to get darker zebra stripes, a firmer consistency, and deeper chocolate flavor to offset the vanilla cream, and I crumbled up the cookie part to layer in the cake the way I did with the nuts and graham cracker crumble on the strawberry cake. Unfortunately I never got a picture of the inside of it, so I guess I’ll just have to re-make it!

The white parts of each cake are variations on a recipe I developed in 2003 as a pie topping. It’s a whipped cream and cream cheese combination that pipes very nicely and tastes better than ice cream on a pumpkin pie! It complimented both the chocolate mousse and strawberry meringue perfectly.

To actually make the cakes, first I had to decide how big to make them. I experimented with different sizes by cutting the plastic lining that I would pipe the mousse into and taping it into circles until I’d deterimined the sizes I wanted. Since the strawberry cake had to be frozen it could only be as big as I could fit in my freezer, but the chocolate mousse cake could be larger and multi-tiered since it only needed to be refrigerated.

I fiddled around with the zebra fabric scraps to choose the direction I wanted the stripes to go on the cakes.

With the pastry rings lined with the plastic sheets I piped the zebra stripes from piping bags filled with the different fillings and didn’t finish until about 6 A.M. the day of the party. (I had to stay up all night to make the cakes so they had enough time to set up before being un-moulded.)

I can’t even tell you how immensly satisfying it was to turn over these cakes, remove the metal rings and peel off the plastic lining sheets to reveal perfect zebra stripes and crisp 90° edges! An OCD person’s ultimate fantasy, I tell you.

The cakes were a massive hit with my friends, and I was so pleased that my hair-brained middle-of-the-night idea worked out exactly how I envisioned it. My only regret is that I didn’t have enough time to write down the recipes and steps as I went along; but hey, having to make these again (for science!) would not be such a bad thing. These recipes definitely need to be documented and enjoyed again… and again!

Avi’s Moroccan Inspired Wedding Gown

When I first met Avi she told me the sweetest story of how her fiancé had proposed to her: he had taken her on a surprise trip to Morocco to get in touch with her Moroccan roots, tracked down the mud-brick home where her father (who passed away when she was a younger) had been born, and that’s where he asked her to marry him. The trip had made an indelible impact on her and as she began to plan her wedding decided she wanted to honor her Moroccan heritage in her wedding dress; not only as a tribute to her father, who would not be there to see her get married, but as a wedding day thank-you surprise to her husband for sparking a new appreciation for her family’s origins. [SIDENOTE: Shout-out to her husband for being so awesome!]

I loved the idea and the sentiment behind it. After discussing all the other details about her wedding and personal style—she would be having a destination wedding in Savannah, Georgia at the end of August and having an outdoor reception, so a breathable, not too heavy gown was a must—we started figuring out what “Moroccan inspired” would mean in the context of her wedding dress. We looked at all things Moroccan: tiles, rugs, and traditional Moroccan wedding dresses festooned with embroidery. The latter would be way too literal an interpretation, and the other things didn’t spark the degree of personal significance that seemed necessary given the original intent of the gown.

I asked if she had any Moroccan family heirlooms that I might be able to see for design inspiration and after some thought she mentioned an embroidered caftan that her Moroccan grandmother had given her when she was little and which she wore as a child. The only problem was she didn’t know where it was or even if it still existed!

A phone call to her mother in Pennsylvania solved the mystery of the Moroccan caftan (I wonder if that’s a Nancy Drew book?). It was in a box in a closet somewhere, her mother was sure, and she would bring it with her next month when she came to New York to join Avi for her next appointment with me. Perfect!

I was really excited to see the caftan up close when Avi came back with her mother a few weeks later. Ever since the design consultation I’d been thinking about a technique that I’d always wanted to use on a wedding dress that would be the perfect vehicle to incorporate Avi’s Moroccan heritage in a subtle but significant way: I would reinterpret the embroidered motifs on the caftan using intricate hand-sewn bias applique. The scale and method would be different, but the scrolls and motifs would come straight from the caftan. Something new from something old, and perfectly unique to Avi!

When I showed them my sketches and explained the idea they loved it and we were all so excited to see it come to life the following summer.

To do the applique I first “draped” some ideas on the mannequin and made some fabric treatment samples, deciding which elements from the caftan would be best articulated with the bias applique. Then I drew out the whole border in pencil, to scale.

A lot of tracing paper and measuring and design tweaking later, I had the final pattern and was ready for the task I’d been day dreaming about since Avi’s design consultation: sitting at my table, twisting and turning and pinning and stitching countless yards of bias tape by hand, following the pattern I’d drawn. If I’ve ever been in my happy sewing zone this was it!

This is exactly the kind of intricate, tedious, repetitive task that I absolutely love to do!

Avi’s mom flew me down for the wedding to help lace up the corset; she told me she didn’t want to worry about getting it wrong if she tried to do it herself, but moreover, after all the work I’d done to make such a special gown for Avi they couldn’t imagine her wedding without me being there.

It was an honor to attend Avi’s wedding (as it is with each of my bride’s weddings that I attend). It’s so fulfilling to do something that I love so much and which means so much to my brides and their families.

The wedding ceremony took place at Temple Mickve Israel, a beautiful historic synagogue in Savannah and one of the oldest in the country. I made Avi’s veil with edging to match the corset and applique.

The night before the wedding there was a Moroccan wedding party, complete with traditional good luck henna tattoos.

After the ceremony all the guests were taken to the wharf for a surprise riverboat trip down the Savannah River to the reception venue.

It was windy on the boat! (Which was nice, because it’s hot in Savannah in August!)

The reception was held at a 200 year old fort on the banks of the Savannah river, Old Fort Jackson. Avi changed into a short version of her wedding skirt that I had made just for the reception, which involved lots of dancing and was lots of fun!

Photo credits for Avi’s wedding photos: Jade + Matthew Take Pictures

Avi’s wedding planner: Bonnie Kaar, First City Events

Avi’s florist: Amy Harvey, Harvey Designs

All the Stuff I Made for Christmas

My mom asked me to come home a few weeks early for Christmas to help her get the house ready for our entire family (10 adults and 4 kids under 2) to be there for the holidays. She gave me free reign on decorating and baking. The prospect of having all the resources of her house—and yard—at my disposal to decorate with was the best Christmas gift she could have given me.

My parents, who have lived in their house longer than I’ve been alive, have a yard with lots of beautiful, mature evergreens, which I never appreciated as a child; I had always wanted flowers like Grandma and Grandpa Komm’s, which they planted from seed each spring in their little greenhouse on the prairie. But Mom was—and still is—all about evergreens and conifers: the shapes, textures, and shades of green that thrive so abundantly in the temperate rainforests of coastal British Columbia.

Although my love for flowers has never waned, I’ve grown to appreciate what my mom sees in her evergreen gardens. Living in New York for 15 years, where everything is grey all winter long, has helped me see what I really had growing up.

As soon as I got home—and it stopped raining—Mom and I walked around the yard with our pruning shears and she pointed out all the best trees and shrubs. I was fascinated to learn all the names and defining characteristics of these plants I’d seen all my life but never really paid attention to. We collected giant buckets of blue spruce; three or four types each of juniper, cedar and pine; and cotoneaster with beautiful red winterberries. What few deciduous trees there are in the yard seem to have been chosen for how exceptional they look with no leaves; we collected twisted hazel and red twig dogwood on subsequent trips.

Using the garage as my workspace, I made so many piles of different branches that I had to park one of the cars in the driveway for a day or two to make room for all the organized chaos. A garage has never smelled better than this one, full of freshly cut evergreen boughs. You’d actually want to go sit in there because it smelled so good!

I spent hours and hours walking and foraging in the woods nearby. I can’t believe this was the first time in 33 years that I’d really paid any attention to the things that grow—even in the dead of winter—right where I grew up! Walking beneath the forest canopy, even though it was the end of December, you could have easily thought it was summertime; everything was green and lush.

Along the way I collected some amazing specimens: salal, a native evergreen bush that makes excellent filler and which you’ve probably seen or bought in flower arrangements; European holly, an invasive species, whose utility in Christmas decorating goes without saying, and, most serendipitously, a rogue boxwood shrub, bushy as can be with long, long stems of shiny little scooped leaves—perfect, because the boxwood in my mom’s yard are all trimmed into meticulous little pom-pom topiaries and were off limits to my clippers.

My original plan had been just to make some table centers for Christmas dinner and a wreath for the front door. Especially a wreath.

But Spoiler alert: I never got around to making that wreath. When I get into my creative zone I let it take me wherever it wants to go and there were too many other exciting things for me to make…

I started with the dining room table. I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do: a 21st century send-up of the classic 1980’s table centers my mom used to make at Christmas when I was little and which would be instantly recognizable to my brothers and sisters: 3 staggered candles sticking up from an oblong display of carnations, chrysanthemums, baby’s breath, and evergreen foliage from the yard with those little glittery miniature wrapped presents on a stick poked in here and there for accent. (Which was the inspiration for what I made for Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s.) But that was before I rediscovered just what a treasure trove my mom’s house was. (It’s quite amazing what you can store in your home when it’s not a tiny Manhattan apartment!)

While my mom decorated her tree in the living room I walked around the house to take inventory of the kind of vases and containers I could use to arrange stuff in. I kept finding candlesticks—gold ones, brass ones, silver ones, crystal ones—hidden away in my old bedroom closet, the basement, and random cupboards; some of them I could even remember being in the living room from my earliest memories and each set brought back memories of what room they had originally been displayed in and what the house had looked like at the time.

After setting them all on the dining room table to see them all in one place, I threw out my original idea for the table center and decided that 40 years worth of accumulated candlesticks should trigger sufficient nostalgia amongst my siblings. It was then obvious to use the gold china, flatware and rimmed goblets, which meant I didn’t have to polish the silverware. I carefully set the full table with all the place settings to see how much space was left for the greens: just enough to run a garland in between all the candlesticks.

I worried—but only for a moment—that a table completely covered in gold might be a little much, but then decided if there was ever an excuse to go completely all-out and over-the-top it was this Christmas and I was going to do it! 2015 was the biggest year ever for our family; my parents got two new grand-babies and a son-in-law, so we had plenty of reasons to celebrate.

For the place cards I made each person (even the brand new babies) a gingerbread cookie “gift tag” attached to a Christmas cracker. I did this years ago but with a different lettering style. This time around I stayed up late the night before designing and practicing the capital letters in ink before piping each name in icing calligraphy.

I made about 8 or 9 feet of garland that ran the length of the table and snaked and curved around all the candles, and a matching 12 foot garland that I draped around the chandelier above the table. I love making garland, it’s like knitting with greenery. I get into my happy OCD repetitive zone for a while and all of a sudden there’s this big long ribbon of something beautiful to show for it.

Once I’d completed the dining room, I went to work on that wreath I’d been dreaming about. But this is what I ended up making for the front door instead:

I discovered this bizarre pile of tree branches hidden outside, which used to be some of the Austrian pine topiaries in the front yard that died a few years ago and my dad cut down. He saved some of the horizontal branches in a pile—which he proudly called modern art—and left it exposed to the elements. I knew I had to use them in my decorating; they were covered in delicate, lacy lichen and their shape was a perfect arboreal approximation of antlers.

The large scale of the Austrian pine branch necessitated another trip to the yard, this time with bypass loppers instead of pruning shears to get long enough branches to work with it. The final arrangement was huge—about 5 feet wide and over 5 feet tall—but it fit perfectly in the alcove next to the front door, making a wreath unnecessary. (I’ll save my wreath idea for a year that I go home and don’t have an extra week-and-a-half to deck the halls.)

With the two biggest decorating objectives out of the way I turned my attention to the rest of the interior stuff. My mom saw how much fun I was having and remembered how much fun she used to have doing the same thing and wanted to get in on the action, so I let her decorate the mantle in the family room—for old time’s sake. (Who am I kidding, what really happened was that she said, “Colette! You’ll never finish all this by yourself and you still have all those cookies to bake and all this mess to clean up before everyone starts showing up!”) Regardless of whose side of the story is told, she wanted to decorate the mantle and had a lot of fun doing it; we both get our jollies out this kind of stuff.

While mom did the family room I worked on the arrangements for the rest of the house.

The arrangement I made in the hallway gave you a glorious whiff of cedar every time you walked past it. That is what Christmas is all about!

I enjoyed making the garland for the dining room so much I made more for the wall candelabra above the staircase. And given the number of candles on the dining table, opted to fill it with Christmas balls instead.

After we thought we were all done and I was taking photos of the orchid in the living room I discovered the best of all the vases hiding on the bottom shelf of the tea cart: a brass Persian teapot. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t it found on my initial reconnaissance trip around the house; it’s one of my favorite things of hers and it was the perfect vessel to hold my last sprays of holly and boxwood.

Oh, and one more Spoiler Alert: We got all the Christmas baking done on time too.

I even made time to class up the cranberry salsa by serving it on a china plate and piping the cream cheese!

And no matter how fancy the house was decorated it wouldn’t have been Christmas without me making my gingerbread snowflakes. I had to stay up all night to make them and polish the silver serving platter, but it was well worth it. It was our best family Christmas ever and certainly the most creatively fulfilling one for me!

What’s a Design Consultation Like?

Since people often ask me how do they go about having me make a gown for them I thought I’d write about a particularly memorable bridal consultation I had last year, and since it’s also about Mother’s Day, it’s kind of pertinent for this weekend!

At the beginning of March 2013, while busily finishing two gowns due at the end of the month, I got an email from a bride enquiring about a gown. I told her that I didn’t have time to do a full design consultation until April but offered to let her stop by my studio to see me and some nearly finished gowns in action.

Since this could possibly be her and her gown in the future it might be nice for her to see the actual process up close, so she stopped by briefly one evening and I showed her the gown I was working on and let her look through my portfolios. The following week she scheduled a formal design consultation in May; her mom would be coming to town for Mother’s Day weekend and was really excited to meet me.

Typically, for a design consultation I set aside an hour to meet with the bride at my studio and discuss every conceivable wedding detail; look at my fabric treatment samples and sometimes even try on existing gown samples that I have. Then, based on all the information I’ve gathered I will do sketches and meet with her again in a week or two for her to see the design options I’ve created. This bride’s mom was only going to be in town for the weekend and really wanted to be there to see the sketches, so I agreed to do the whole process within a two-day window!

During the consultation we talked about everything from the groom’s attire to the wedding cake (this bride had sent me a power point presentation of all her wedding planning and inspiration photos, which I fully appreciate – the more information I have the better!). They were scheduled to come back on Sunday afternoon to see the sketches but as soon as they left on Saturday I had a mini panic-attack: how was I going to come up with this girl’s wedding gown in such a short amount of time?! Should I cancel the next day’s meeting and tell them I needed more time to gather my thoughts and do the sketches? I put it out of my mind for the rest of the day and went out to dinner with a friend, who reminded me that I work best under pressure anyways!

The way my creative process works is to shift focus to something completely different for as long as it takes for the ideas and information I’ve gathered to sort themselves out in the back of my mind and percolate on their own time. Then, once I’m ready to sketch, I’ll go through my fashion history books, old sketchbooks, and style files (which are my encyclopedic collection of magazine tears––an analog Pinterest, if you will!) to see what details pop out at me for the particular bride I’m sketching for. I never really know what I’m going to design for the bride until I put pencil to paper and start drawing.

I sketched two new options; the first of which I lingered on longer with my pencil. There was something about it that kept speaking to me for this bride but I had no idea if she’d like it or not. I also pulled some sketches I’d done previously but never made from my archives.

When they arrived to see the sketches I prefaced the reveal with, “Keep in mind that this is just a starting point, so let me know what you like and what you don’t…obviously I didn’t have as much time to think about these as I usually would.”

Not sure how they’d react, I prepared to for the worst while they silently inspected my sketchbook but thankfully the opposite happened: the bride pointed to sketch number one and said, “I love this one, I think it’s just perfect, it’s so me!”

Then the mom, who had remained uncharacteristically silent up to this point, piped up enthusiastically, “As soon as I saw that drawing I knew my daughter would pick it because it is just so her! How did you come up with it? Everything about it—it’s just perfect for her!” She went on to explain that they had spent the previous afternoon unsuccessfully trying on gowns at other salons, and decided she needed a certain type of waistline and bodice, none of which existed anywhere, and all of which were right there in my sketch. She was so impressed with how I had figured out each of those specific lines and proportions all from just meeting with them for an hour.

So there was a reason I had spent more time on that first sketch; it was this bride’s dress! (Neither of these photos are of her gown sketch–gotta keep the design a secret until her August wedding!)

With the gown picked, we started talking about a veil which I sketched right there next to the gown drawing. As a general rule, if I’m going to make a bride’s dress and she wants a veil I like to make it too. That way it is perfectly suited to her and her gown and can be made to highlight or compliment certain important details of the dress.

In any event, the best part about this consultation was the special note the mother of the bride sent with the deposit check letting me know what a special Mothers Day it had been for her to spend it with her only daughter and to see the gown I had designed that was just perfect for her… That’s what I love about my job: being an intimate part of important life events and providing something that creates special memories for families. I’m so excited to get working on this particular dress, you might have seen bits and pieces of it on Instagram.

Kate’s Bodice

This is a bodice I made for my couture bride, Kate, who was referred to me by her bridal stylist, Jackie Weppner, of Merci New York, after experiencing a wedding gown nightmare: the custom gown she had purchased from another designer didn’t fit her torso and they were frustrated and confused by a variety of aesthetic concerns with her particular gown which had not been an issue when she had tried on the original sample and bought the dress.

(The gown she had first tried on was most likely an actual runway sample; this is something brides should be aware of before buying a gown: designers will often send their runway samples out for trunk shows, but the production version of that gown can vary significantly in construction, fabrication, detailing and even design in order for them to be cost-effectively reproduced.)

When we all met to discuss what I could do to fix the problems there were only two months before Kate’s wedding. I had another gown to finish for one of my brides getting married at around the same time as Kate, so it would have been impossible to make an entirely new gown. And though Kate was at her wit’s end, second guessing the purchase of her gown in the first place and wishing she had found me sooner, Jackie and I were certain that I could address all the issues she had with the original gown by re-designing the bodice, replacing the interior of the skirt and creating something that she would feel spectacular in.

She wanted to feel light and tiny in her wedding gown, and the original bodice weighed her down and swallowed up her tiny frame. The way it was constructed gave her – for lack of a better term – a mono-boob, and she wanted her bustline to be defined, yet minimized. She was uncomfortable in the gown and kept feeling the need to pull the bodice up to cover her bustline. The interior of the skirt needed to be replaced; the skirt layers were prone to be tripped over, and the lining was too tight for Kate and her husband to do their choreographed first dance in, which required her to be able to kick up her leg. Essentially, I would create an entirely “new dress” and re-purpose the existing outer skirt layers.

In this photo of the original bodice (with the lace removed) over top of the one I made from her measurements you can see how the original was nearly two inches too short in the waist; no wonder she felt like she was constantly on the verge of a wardrobe malfunction in the original gown! In addition, the bodice had several layers of fabric where much fewer would have sufficed, and this unnecessary layering created the bulkiness that Kate didn’t want, especially around the neckline, where the thickness of the seam allowances created an unflattering ridge.

To make Kate’s bodice I used my special bustier construction techniques to create a light-as-air but highly constructed bodice that would give her the wrinkle-free, flawlessly defined figure that she was seeking. As you can see from the next photo, it’s sturdy enough to stand up on its own, but thin enough that light streaming through my window on a sunny afternoon filters right through it.

The waistline of the original gown had been rather abrupt, where the opaque, dense bodice met the ethereal, airy skirt. I changed it so that the juncture of the two elements seamlessly melded into each other, and adjusted the angles and proportions of the dropped waistline to be more flattering to Kate’s figure. And, as always, I added functional lace covered buttons to the back of the bodice (where there had been none on the original).

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When the gown was complete we were all extremely happy with the results, no one more than Kate herself. While wearing the gown during the final fitting with her mother present, as well as Jackie, and her wedding planner, Lauren, she ecstatically proclaimed, “It’s perfect, it’s perfect, it’s perfect, it’s perfect! This is exactly how I always wanted to feel in my wedding dress!”

If you’d like to see Kate in her gown on her wedding day, her wedding, photographed by Christian Oth Studios, was featured on Style Me Pretty recently. Special thanks to Jackie Weppner of Merci New York, for the referral, and to Kate’s wedding planner, Lauren Sozmen, of Loli Events, who was extremely helpful in coordinating fittings with the bride who lives in Ohio. And of course, congratulations to my couture bride, Kate, and her husband Dominic!

Gingerbread Cookie Collaboration 2013!

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If you know me you know that I love making cookies and I love Christmas, which naturally means that I really love making Christmas cookies! Over the last few years it’s become a tradition of mine to make snowflakes out of gingerbread, and pipe them rather ornately with royal icing.

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I like to call them Rococo snowflakes, but they could just as easily be Baroque snowflakes, and some of them could even pass for Art Deco snowflakes, but I digress. What’s more important is that it’s kind of like doing embroidery but with something sweet and edible and I have way too much fun doing it!

I’ve been hearing for years from the ecstatic recipients of these cookies (I’ve only ever made them for my family and friends) that I need to make them available to the rest of the world, so this year I asked my friend Amy Noelle, who owns Sugar Flower Cake Shop and makes wedding cakes decorated with beautiful sugar flowers, if she would like to team up and help me bake, decorate, and sell my gingerbread snowflakes this holiday season. She thought it was a great idea!

Now everyone will have a chance to find out for themselves if these cookies are indeed too pretty to eat (trust me, they are not–they taste just as good as they look)! You’ll be able to pre-order our first batch of cookies through Amy’s website by the end of the month, so stay tuned for details.

And be sure and follow both of us on Instagram, as we’ll be posting lots of photos as we go… Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Jenn – Salt Lake City, Utah

I’m excited to finally share photos of one of my latest Couture Brides, Jenn! She was a dream to work with and I’ve had fun sifting through all of her wedding photos by Heather Nan Photography to find these, my favorites of her and the gown I made for her.

After Jenn’s initial design consultation the three absolute-must-haves for her dress were that it had to have sleeves, she wanted it to show her collarbones because that’s her favorite feature, and she really liked tulle.

Less important were that it be an A-line or ball-gown silhouette—with not too much of a train—and that she also liked “sparkly stuff” but was not dead set on it…

With those criteria in mind I thought about it for the next few days. After drawing the first sketch I knew she was going to pick it, so I held off on doing any more drawings until I could prove my hunch. This was indeed her dress! When she saw it she loved it and that was that!

At the time of her design consultation, the wedding was going to take place in Newport Beach in March, so I did the original sketch with very slight cap sleeves and gave her the option of doing a longer 3/4 length sleeve depending on how the dress evolved; I would drape it both ways to decide what looked best on her when we fit the muslin. But before I got to making the muslin the location of the wedding was changed to Salt Lake City (same time of year), so we decided to go ahead with the longer sleeve since it would look and feel more appropriate in the colder climate. That’s one of the great things about doing a custom gown; it can evolve and change to perfectly suit many different criteria.

www.heathernanphoto.com

The gown is actually two separate pieces: a tulle and organza skirt, and the gown, which is more like a jacket with a train (in double face duchess satin—the same fabric I used to make my sister’s wedding gown). Jenn was planning to wear the gown as pictured for the whole wedding and reception, so I constructed it accordingly, but for a bride that just wanted to have shoulders and arms covered for the wedding ceremony I could have easily made the skirt underneath into a gown of its own with a strapless bodice or corset. Again, that’s the beauty of doing a custom gown—making it unique to the bride who will be wearing it.

Congratulations to Jenn and her husband! They are a lovely couple, and, as always, I enjoyed getting to know them and having such a special role to play for their big day!

Special Guest Blogger: One of My Brides, Lisa

On Choosing Colette Komm by L. H. Grant

A week after my engagement, on a flight from New York to Phoenix, I found myself sitting next to the head of Oscar de la Renta Bridal. I’d seen the collection online and loved it — one gown in particular. “Why don’t you meet me in Scottsdale and you can try it on?” The dress search has ended before it’s even begun, I thought to myself.

Two days later I was standing in front of a full-length mirror wearing the gown I thought would be “the one.” But something was off. It wasn’t that the dress wasn’t beautiful or that it wasn’t flattering on me. Everything was lovely. There was just something that felt too manufactured about it — like a photoshopped image or a library filled with decorative books that have never been opened. I returned to New York empty handed.

Back home I visited more bridal salons, tried on more dresses and left with the same feeling I’d had in Scottsdale. It wasn’t until I walked into Colette’s studio that I found the authenticity I’d been looking for.

I once heard it said that great art is great not because of the questions it answers, but because of the questions it asks. As Colette showed me each gown in her collection, I found myself wanting to know more: how long it takes to hand-stitch each petal onto one dress, how she makes a skirt look like meringue peaks, how her gowns can at once be so exquisitely detailed, yet convey such a feeling of absolute simplicity.

As she told me about her creation process, and I watched her delicately handle each dress, I could see what made these gowns so different. Colette knew each stitch; she’d sewn each one with her own two hands. These dresses were never in a factory, never shuffled through a line of seamstresses, never a concept sketch sent to a sample room to interpret. Because Colette sees each creation from bride to sketch to pattern to muslin to gown back to bride, the final product has a sense of life, of history to it. Her gowns are Parisian architecture; the others, cookie cutter subdivisions.

On my wedding day the beauty of Colette’s work was evident not just to me, but to my guests — and not just to those who follow fashion. A dressmaker commented that she’d sewn hundreds of gowns but never managed to make any seem like they were an actual extension of the bride. “The dress is like part of your skin the way it moves on you,” she said. A retired police chief — a man I’ve known my whole life who has never taken any notice of fashion — was so struck by my gown that he said, “that’s exactly how I want my daughter to look on her wedding day.”

As for me, the greatest compliment I can pay to Colette and to the integrity of her creative process is to genuinely tell the truth: I have never seen a wedding dress — before or since my wedding — that I find more beautiful than the one she made for me. And for that, I thank her.

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