Fancy Dress for Engagement Photos - Inspiration and Design

I have decided to make a fancy dress for my engagement photo shoot next month!

The shoot is scheduled for right after we get back from Australia (on Nov 24) - So I have between now and then to design and create my masterpiece. This will be the first installment in a series of posts on the project as I work through design, testing, creation and the actual finished dress!

Fabric pinned onto the mannequin in the shape of my dress

In this post I will mainly talk about the vision I have for the dress, the inspiration to get to this point and the fabric I bought. :)

I started thinking about what I wanted our engagement photos to "look and feel" like back in September and made the decision that I couldn't choose between a fancy and a casual look so we are going to have a two part session so we could do super fancy and super casual! Because making a decision is hard so let's just do it all.

My inspiration for the dress comes from some of the gorgeous editorial style shoots I have seen on wedding blogs and one designer in particular - Emily Riggs - who makes beautiful gowns with lace and chiffon in non-traditional bridal colours.

At the beginning of October I pulled the trigger and ordered my fabric for the project, I got four colours of tulle (peach 5 yards, ivory 5 yards, melon 8 yards, marsala 4 yards), and champagne lace - 1.5 yards for the outer layer, and rayon challis in mauve - 2 yards and pink/gold chiffon - 4 yards for the base.

The other thing I decided was that I wanted the Base Layer to be separate from the Lace and Tulle layer so that I could potentially wear that again at some point since the mauve and pink/gold fabrics are so pretty. So here is some inspo just for that base layer!

I'm using McCall's M7507 as the main pattern to alter to fit my vision - it has a good set up for the outside part, but I had to work a bit to get the under layer how I want (spoiler alert I'm already working through my muslin process - that will be the next post)