Well this is a surprise!

NB - posting was delayed while matters continued. Stay tuned for additional instalments!

My dear son is in a long-term relationship with a wonderful young woman - like, they have been living together for 10 years. Until recently, there was no talk of marriage, though their friends were happily walking down the aisle (or equivalent) and even producing babies. 

So we were of course delighted when they told us that they planned to marry this year. My future daughter in law broached, very timidly, the subject of me possibly sewing her wedding dress but initially I declined. Mostly, I thought it would be hard to sew such an important dress. I had reasons. She lives a 5 hour drive away, which would make fitting/consultations difficult. She isn't a sewer and hasn't routinely had anyone sew for her so conversations about garment style (patterns) divorced from a specific fabrication thereof are difficult. We don't speak the same language re garments. Mostly, getting it wrong would be horrific! 

She didn't argue with me, and very kindly invited me, along with her mother, to come wedding dress shopping. We did, soon after Christmas. We saw some things that looked promising but no decisions were made.

Weeks later, I asked if she had ended up buying any of the dresses we had seen. I was surprised to get no response. A few weeks after that, my son spilled the beans. She had bought a dress, but it wasn't going to fit, because she is also EXPECTING! Holy cow! All the family things are happening all at once, all of a sudden!

In this new circumstance, despite the dress issue being even more fraught, because SIZE and SHAPE are only to be guessed at months ahead, I offered to make the dress. Yikes! (Yes, I may be an idiot.)

My first task was to pad my dress form to get the approximately correct bust and upper body dimensions based on measurements taken at about 12 weeks. I have my fingers crossed that the bust will be close in size to this until the very end of pregnancy (after the wedding!). 

I found a quilt at the thrift store and draped a muslin cover (notice the separating zipper so I could get it on and off). I briefly thought of also padding for a baby bump but decided it would be unnecessary as well as kind of difficult to get right.

I started draping the fabric and got a positive reaction to this:

I bought this pattern to use as a base, although it will obviously require modification. 

As of mid-April, I was mulling over how much width and length I would need to add for the expanding belly. I decided to make the waistband narrower by about 5.5 cm so it would sit higher on the body. I also decided to build in stretch in the front (stretch fabric base and elastic in the waistband). A draping experiment using a pillow as simulation suggested I would need about 4 cm more length at CF in the skirt, plus the removed length from the original waistband - in total about 10 cm. Plus about 2 cm at CF to bring the line of the bodice up at the very centre. Fingers crossed!

Re the width, I measured the skirt front of a Burda Magazine maternity evening dress. It was 80 cm wide! I thought that might be excessive (?) so added "only" to make it about 74 cm. 

Thus, I got an adjusted pattern. Next step would be to cut out my muslin, which I had billed as a "practice dress". Wish me luck.