This project was born when a bride asked me to create a unique wedding ensemble for her that would reflect her style and honor her fiancé's Scottish heritage. She wanted to incorporate that heritage by using Thistle and Heather designs embroidered on the corset. She also requested that we use some kind of interesting design elements to make the piece unique. She showed me several pictures of corsets and design lines that she liked. After looking through what she was drawn to, I knew that I wanted to use bold and dramatic geometric lines to symbolically bring a masculine side to the softer feminine embroidery in which she wanted the piece to be covered. Inspired by the sharp contrast in thistles between the thorns and the flower, I created a design that I felt met my desire for strong and bold geometry to offset the large amounts of hand embroidery.

I began by drafting a pattern from the bride's measurements. After creating the muslin, while the piece was on the dress form, I drew in new style lines, cut the first muslin apart and created a new pattern from it to reflect the final design. This created a bit of a challenge as I had to break the front pieces into parts to create the final design lines I wanted.
The bride decided that she wanted the entire piece made from silk, including silk floss for the embroidery. She chose a dark purple silk taffeta with a cream silk taffeta for contrast. I knew that I needed a strong core to shape her voluptuous figure properly to make her look stunning on her wedding day. To stabilize the silk and create a corset that could become an heirloom for her I created the strength layer from two layers of coutil and used a combination of spiral and flat spring steel. I sandwiched the finished corset interior between the the silk facings and hand sewed the edges.

I did not have very much experience with hand silk embroidery before making this corset, so I put almost a full forty hours of research into techniques and stitch patterns before designing the actual embroidery. Using a combination of resource images, I drew a Thistle and Heather pattern that gave the impression of vines growing up the front of the corset and down the back, beginning with bouquets of Thistles and Heather on the bottom front. It took over 120 hours to hand embroider all of the pieces over the course of almost three weeks. Ribbons were added to the bouquets at the front bottom and to the ends of the points on the back. These were removable after the ceremony.

After the corset was complete, I created a flowing saw-tooth edged skirt to complete the ensemble.

Read more in Jennifer's Dress Diary