Classic lace wedding dress

Recently the most requested wedding dress style I have been asked for is with a lace overlay.

Lace has been trending (I hate that expression) in wedding dress design for the past few years but last years Royal Wedding really upped the ante...

Lace has such a wonderful finish, and it is the most feminine of all fabrics in my opinion. I remember lace being considered very old fashioned when I was young, but I always found it's delicacy lovely to behold. Back in my goth days as a teenager I remember donning all sorts of  lace things that made me feel much more grown up and sexually alluring, I loved that it could cover and conceal all at the same time.

But enough of my reminiscences...   more about lace.

There are perhaps as many different types of lace as there are types of wine, and similarly to wine different styles of lace are historically directly related to their place of origin. If you fancy a real in depth study of lace I can recommend a viewing of the Lace Guild website. Back in the day lace was painstakingly made by hand using some simple principles and equipment and a lot of patience. Luckily for the modern dressmaker most lace is made by machine...making it affordable and readily available. But like everything in life the better the quality the more expensive the product. 

Here are a few of my favourite styles of lace that I use:

Chantilly : This style of lace is named after the region of it's inception, Chantilly in France (although, unlike wines, laces are no longer just made in the place they are named after)

Chantilly lace is characterised by it's light floral patterns and use of half and whole stitch fill to create area's of light and shadow within a solid outline. It usually has an 'eyelash' effect on the border pattern also, which I find quite endearing.

Guipure Lace :  Guipure lace refers to a thick lace that has no background. The pattern is entirely self supporting and does not need the netting background of other lace styles.

Guipure lace has a solid kind of charm and I find very versatile for putting on corsets either as an overlay or a trim. Some of the more built up designs have a wonderful grandeur about them, remember Prada using loads of built up guipure laces in 2008?