The 1974 Crocheted Wedding Dress…

Hello Everyone! I hope you are all keeping safe and well… 🙂

My crochet hooks are busy behind the scenes at the moment so whilst I haven’t got any new crochet to show you, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to share a little of my mum’s crocheted wedding dress!

I’ve spoken about my mum’s crocheted wedding dress many times before and it remains an inspiration to me. This blog post is my tribute to the dress which my mum lovingly made and wore back in 1974! Isn’t that just so special… 🙂

I’ll tell you a little more about the wedding dress and show you some recent photos too (yes, fortunately we still have the actual dress)!

I shared the photo above on my Instagram back in September with the caption below and it got such a lovely response.

‘How I became yarny’… 🥰🧶🧶🧶 Day 3 of the #yarnfriendsrock challenge! Well here are my parents on their wedding day back in 1974 and my mum is wearing a dress which she crocheted herself… amazing to think these photos were taken 46 years ago and it’s such a beautiful dress she crocheted! 😍👗🥰💕 So yarn really has been in my life since Day 1… 🥰🧶 I grew up watching my mum either knit or crochet and my Dutch Oma made an entire wardrobe of clothes for my dolls which included knitted, crocheted and sewn little garments! My aunt was an amazing seamstress too… I was sent to school in hand knitted cardigans and handmade dresses – our home was truly a handmade home! So naturally it didn’t take long for me to get creating myself and I’ve knitted, sewn and crocheted throughout my adult life… so thank you to my creative elders for passing all that yarn love on to me!! 🥰 My mum turned 80 last week and she’s currently knitting a scarf for our 16 year old… it’s looking fabulous! 🧡🧡🧡 It’s so special that the yarn crafting continues… 🧶🧶😍

Lots of people replied with such beautiful words – the photo and words that I wrote certainly touched many people and reminded them of a different era and weddings gone by! As well as being able to relate to that handmade home.

So of course I felt that my mum’s beautiful dress deserved a blog post all of its own! My mum is Dutch and my Dad is English… their wedding took place in an English countryside village and here are some more photos from that day in August 1974…

Crochet was always destined to be a part of me wasn’t it…?! 🙂

My mum used a specific crochet wedding dress pattern which she found in a Dutch magazine but on recommendation from a colleague of hers, rather than follow the stitch counts in the pattern, she based the overall size on an existing well fitting summer dress she had at the time. As the rows progressed and the fabric grew she would hold it up to the existing dress to make sure it matched. In this way, the wedding dress became the perfect fit for her!

I was chatting to my mum about it over WhatsApp video call earlier in the week and she told me that the dress was crocheted as a team effort between both her and her mum (my Dutch grandmother who I called “Oma”). They both crocheted different parts of the dress!

I love that so much… and here are some recent photos I took to really show the dress in more detail…

Isn’t it amazing?! I would love to replicate it one day, maybe in different colours… it really is such a beautifully simple design! Those super tall crochet stitches are really effective.

My mum wore the dress during her honeymoon to Paris too! How wonderful is that… it’s such a beautiful dress but not overly wedding-like so she could walk through the streets of Paris and no one knew she was in a wedding dress! Although of course she must have looked just gorgeous! It’s such a versatile dress…

And now fast forward 46 years and my daughter was happy to model the dress on our local beach!!

It’s so wonderful to see it worn again! And Salty was there too enjoying her time with us on the beach…

A few more beautiful photos… you can really see the dress swish! It has such a beautiful drape and movement in the crocheted fabric…

And honestly, these two photos were taken on the very same day as those above! The sun made a sudden appearance and what a difference to the lighting it makes…

Crochet didn’t feature much in my own wedding in 1999! Following in my mother’s footsteps I did make my own dress but it was a sewn dress made with Nottingham lace…

There were plenty of other handmade features at our wedding from the invitations and place names to my husband’s waistcoat, the cake and flower arrangements… but no crochet! That came later for me…

I had real daisies in my bouquet… how lovely that I designed these crocheted ones for Simply Crochet magazine earlier this year… wouldn’t they make a fabulous wedding bouquet! The pattern is available here… https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/daisy-bouquet-3

I did end up crocheting a dress for a special occasion though… here’s my daughter back in 2014 in a dress I made which sparked my own crochet journey! I often think of this dress as the moment when crochet took over my life. I loved crocheting it so very much and was so happy with the end result…

So crocheted dresses for special occasions are so very wonderful and very special to me indeed. My mum’s crocheted wedding dress really is fabulous and something I think very fondly of… I love it so much and hope you’ve enjoyed discovering a little more about it too…

Happy Crocheting Everyone! 🙂 🙂