Brooks Ann Camper Bridal Couture

Custom Wedding Dresses and Sewing Lessons in Hillsborough, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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Tiffany’s Basted Fitting + Prep & Corrections

❤ Posted by brooks ann on August 20, 2020

Aug 20

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

Aug 4

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

Jul 22

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

Apr 15

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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Constructing Tiffany’s Wedding Dress: Skirt & Midriff

❤ Posted by brooks ann on March 17, 2020

Mar 17

Constructing Tiffany's Wedding Dress: Skirt & Midriff by Brooks Ann Camper Bridal Couture

After our 2nd mockup fitting, it was finally time to get started making the custom dress that Tiffany would wear on her wedding day! Having snapped literally hundreds of photos while constructing Tiffany’s wedding dress in preparation for our basted fitting, I’m breaking the process down into several parts for sharing with all of you. This post will be all about getting started while creating the skirt and the midriff portions of her dress. I hope you enjoy the play-by-play in this (and my upcoming) posts!

Underlining the Skirt

If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that I underline almost every garment I create. Underlining (also called flat lining) is a technique of backing your fabrics with another fabric in order to provide extra structure, reduce wrinkling, offer a place to hide stitches for invisible finishes, and much much more. Underlining is a simple technique that can take every custom garment to a level above what can be found in ready-to-wear.

To learn more about underlining, check out my 3-part blog series (with video!) on the technique or this condensed version that I wrote for Seamwork Magazine. You could also type “underlining” in my blog’s search bar to watch me underline nearly every dress in my Portfolio.

If you’ve followed my blog closely, you’ll also know that one of my favorite techniques is to reuse the fabric from my mockup dress as my underlining fabric. But for Tiffany’s dress, I didn’t have this luxury……

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Déjà Vu: Tiffany’s Mockup Dress #2!

❤ Posted by brooks ann on February 18, 2020

Feb 18

Déjà Vu: Tiffany's Mockup Dress #2! by Brooks Ann Camper Bridal Couture

After Tiffany’s first mockup fitting, I was ready to use the edited patterns and original polyester mockup dress to create a second mockup dress for a second mockup fitting. As I sorted through the photos to create this blog post, I realized that everything looked very similar to what I’ve shared before! So it’s kinda Déjà Vu for Mockup #2!

Second Time’s a Charm!

Since there were so many tweaks made to the bodice during the first mockup fitting, I needed to completely recut and create a new mockup top for Tiffany to try on in Round Two….

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Tiffany’s First Mockup Fitting (and Pattern Corrections)!

❤ Posted by brooks ann on January 21, 2020

Jan 21

Tiffany's First Mockup Fitting (and Pattern Corrections)! by Brooks Ann Camper Bridal Couture

The very first fitting is always a fun part of the custom process. The dress the bride tries on in a first fitting is not the real dress- it is a mockup version. This means that you can play around with changes in a completely no-risk way! The custom design was created from scratch and the custom pattern was created from scratch so I love that the mockup process eliminates any pressure for prior perfection. The goal of the mockup fitting is to experiment with improvements and to play!

When Tiffany arrived at the studio, she beamed with excitement seeing the mockup dress on the form. She couldn’t wait to try it on!

And when she saw herself in the mirror for the first time, her smile said it all!…

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brooksanncamper

Hi there! I'm Brooks Ann, and I'm an independent designer and couture dressmaker for one-of-a-kind bridalwear located in Hillsborough, North Carolina. I also teach the sew-curious both in-person and online.

My blog follows along with the couture process of how each heirloom-quality custom wedding dress is made from idea to wedding day, as well as other interesting tidbits related to sewing, weddings, and body positivity.

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Featured in Seamwork Magazine:

"Pressing Forward"
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Listen to my Love To Sew podcast interview!

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