More photos are in my Facebook album for this gown.

Literally as soon as I saw the wedding on TV, I started drafting the wedding gown, and finished this prototype within 24 hours, which may be close to the record!   I couldn’t afford to go all out in silk and custom lace, and so settled on white bridal satin without lace.  I used an English embroidered netting I already had on hand, and made a mad rush to every fabric store within 75 miles to buy enough bridal satin.  That many full-length layers to the train takes a ton of fabric!  And it was still quite an investment for a prototype.  It’s not perfect, but my goal was to see how close of an approximation I could make before bigger names’ knock-offs of this Sarah Burton (for Alexander McQueen) gown could hit the market.  With more time now to research the original, it’s easy to see some overall design details that I missed, such as the shape of the overtrains, but again, this gown was finished within 24 hours, and before many detail photos had hit the internet.

The original gown cost the Middleton family a rather modest £40,000.  Of course that’s budget-breaking to most of the rest of us but reasonably low for a royal wedding.

Please pardon the photo quality.  My photos were taken with an iPhone 4.