How to Cut Up a Dress

The dress was the first thing I bought (a mere 5 days after our official engagement). I was so excited about and went to a lot of different places, finally found it on the clearance rack at a snooty store in Plano.

For some reason, wedding dresses are always too long. It doesn't matter how tall you are, they always have to be hemmed. I'm not offbeat enough to wear a red dress or something totally unexpected, so mine needs some work to make it fit.

I went to a "highly recommended" seamstress who works in a fancy shop with chandeliers and nice seating. I tried on the dress and she suggested that she would have to take the dress apart (i.e. dissemble it) and put it back together. That sounded pretty extreme to me, so my mom and I asked a lot of questions. I made one suggestion, and she responded that if we did that it would flatten my chest, and she didn't want to make that worse. Obviously that was uncalled for, and I responded that I was confident in my bust size and didn't want to add a bunch of padding and artificial nonsense.

Finally, she declared that she didn't want to do the alterations on my dress. She promptly unzipped it so I could get out of it and leave her shop. She knew she could do a great job, she said, but there were too many questions about her work. I apologized if my questions were offensive, but I was merely trying to understand. Being an informed consumer is supposed to be a good thing. Oh, and she wanted to charge $700. She's delusional. I guess most of her customers throw down that much money without asking questions. Yikes.

So I went with a seamstress who works in a little shop who did the alterations for some friends of mine. She listened to my questions and answered them, and had some creative solutions for things the other seamstress didn't even consider. And she told me I looked great in the dress.