brooks ann

Tiffany’s Wedding Day!

❤ Posted by brooks ann on October 14, 2020

It’s finally time to share about Tiffany’s wedding day!!! Yay!!!

Tiffany and Kemp were married in December 2018 in the cutest little chapel in downtown Raleigh. Jessica of Three Region Photography was there to capture the day and all its gorgeousness. I could chit chat, but the photos (and some words from Tiffany) say it all! Let’s get right to it!

Getting Ready

Next door to the chapel was the little room where Tiffany would get ready for her wedding day. I felt the magic as soon as I arrived to deliver the dress…

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Tiffany’s Photoshoot and Delivery Day!

❤ Posted by brooks ann on September 30, 2020

As we are nearing the end of the bridal blog series following the creation of Tiffany’s custom wedding dress, I am really feeling the anticipation and excitement. After making the final stitch, there were still a couple of events before the Wedding Day: The Photoshoot and the Delivery Day (which also became a photoshoot!)

The Studio Photoshoot

Before a custom dress leaves my studio, I have learned to get my own “professional” shots. After months of working through the couture custom process, I get really attached to my work and become nervous to let it go without some serious sharable documentation. Most wedding photographers are delighted for me to share their photos, but they all have different policies and styles. I’ve learned that if you need to be certain that something will be available to you, you often have to do it yourself. Luckily, DIY is my jam!

With the help of my handsome husband Charles, I turned my sewing studio into a photo studio and pretended I was a professional photographer for a day.

But before I share my favorite shots…

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Finishing Tiffany’s Wedding Dress

❤ Posted by brooks ann on September 15, 2020

After the basted fitting, it was all about finishing. Anything temporary would now become permanently secured and all the gorgeous inner sewing guts would be finished off and hidden inside a lining. My To-Do list would get shorter and shorter until each task was checked off. This is such an exciting part of the process… Thanks so much for following along!

Missing Something?

Though I didn’t quite put my finger on it during the basted fitting, I had a nagging thought that there was something missing in Tiffany’s dress. So before moving forward with finishing, I compared my memories and photos from the fitting with the final sketch– looking for anything I may have missed or done a little differently.

And I found it.

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Tiffany’s Basted Fitting + Prep & Corrections

❤ Posted by brooks ann on August 20, 2020

If you’ve been following along as I tell the story of how Tiffany’s wedding dress came to be, you’ll know that we are nearing the end. But there’s still plenty of work to do to get Tiffany’s wedding dress from being a carefully constructed collection of bits & pieces into becoming an actual dress that’s wedding-day-ready. And so far, Tiffany herself had only seen and tried on mockup versions of her dress.

The basted fitting is an important and exciting part of the custom process. After all the hard prep work, it is the first time that the ideas back in the design and sketch phase become a custom-fit reality. The custom dress form, the custom pattern drafting, the mockups, the fittings, and all the careful and creative cutting and crafting of the silk, have all led up to finally becoming a wearable form. I’ve permanently finished everything I’m confident won’t change- and the rest, gets basted. The basted fitting is the first time the real garment is try-on-able, but also another helpful opportunity for making changes and improvements.

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Constructing Tiffany’s Wedding Dress: Collar & Neckline

❤ Posted by brooks ann on August 4, 2020

The most dramatic elements of Tiffany’s custom wedding dress design are the gorgeous collar and neckline. Once the shoulder seams and cut-in-one sleeves were finished, it was time to get started creating them!

Much of what makes a couture dress beautiful (and expensive) is hidden deep inside the layers. I love sharing “behind the seams” peeks into how flat fabric can be transformed. Thanks for following along!

The Experiments

As you may remember from Tiffany’s sketches and/or mockups, a dramatic collar and open neckline will frame Tiffany’s gorgeous face and neck. In order to determine the right methods to achieve this, I worked through some experiments and samples.

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Constructing Tiffany’s Wedding Dress: Cut-in-One-Sleeves

❤ Posted by brooks ann on July 22, 2020

The blog is back! The newsletter is back! The Skirt Skills Freeview is back!

There’s a bazillion reasons why I’ve been offline since my dog died on the first day of May, and many were because I was creating content for you! After 6+ years of teaching my popular Online Course Skirt Skills, I’ve spent most of my Stay-At-Home time creating a new-and-improved 2nd Edition. This comprehensive “Intro to Custom Sewing” online course shares 16 hours of self-produced video(!), and I am so excited about what I’ve created. Now that production is complete, I’m offering a free preview for the next couple of weeks before registration opens on August 8 for a Skirt Skills session starting August 20. Learn more here!

Back to the Bridal Blog!

But likely you are here for the blog! And I’m back to sharing about Tiffany’s wedding dress! Yay!

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that I share all the “behind-the-seams” goodies as I create each custom wedding dress. (If you are new, you might enjoy starting here!) I don’t begin sharing the story until after the bride is married, so all of these photos are from the past. Tiffany’s wedding was in December of 2018, long before the Coronavirus started postponing weddings. I hope you enjoy the continuation of Tiffany’s story, which I’ve been telling post-by-post for quite a while. To get caught up, start here (and click through as the story unfolds)!

And I know you are all barely able to contain your excitement to hear about bodice construction with cut-in-one short sleeves! Yaaayyyyy! Wait… what??

Ok… so I know this post may only appeal to super sewing nerds, but there’s actually a lot to share about a seemingly simple (boring?) topic. Personally, I think cut-in-one sleeve construction is super fun and incredibly interesting. I hope you will too!

So without further ado…

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Limited Offer: A Freeview of Skirt Skills, my Intro to Custom Sewing eCourse!

❤ Posted by brooks ann on April 15, 2020

Brooks Ann Camper in her studio

Hey ya’ll! Hanging in there?

In case you are new here, I’m Brooks Ann Camper! I first learned to sew as a young adult in professional workrooms and have been creating custom garments for individuals ever since. After a costuming internship at the Yale School of Drama, I earned a Masters Degree in Costume Production and past jobs include sewing for Broadway productions such as Wicked and Mama Mia!, creating unique dramatic pieces for clients such as Bernadette Peters, Felicia Rashaad, Kristin Chenoweth, the Rockettes, the Muppets… just to name a very few. I now create custom couture wedding dresses (while blogging the process) and I teach my unique methods of custom sewing and patternmaking online.

Learn more in my interview on the Love To Sew podcast.

For the first half of March, I put everything aside to focus on creating a gorgeous wedding dress for a bride named Claire. (That’s a peek at the mockup dress behind me, which seriously might be my favorite ever!). Checking wedding dressmaking off my To-Do List was going to allow me to get back to finalizing epic projects that have been in-the-works since the end of 2018.

Then the world turned upside down.

I’m doing okay. In some ways, I’ve been unknowingly training for this. Not only do my child-free husband and I already work solo, we live with our 15-year-old coonhound. To support him as best we can, we took our last vacation in October and then cleared our schedules indefinitely to have at least one of us home every few hours. …

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