Your best bet is to take your dress to a place where they only specialize in bridal gown preservation. There, they will clean your dress for you. It is best to get your dress cleaned as soon as possible after the wedding day, this way your dress won't become yellow with age. Its best to get it cleaned once every year or so, that way it will look as beautiful as the day you bought it.
Depending on where you are ordering it from you should give it at least two months to order and receive your wedding dress.
three to six months
Many women like to save their wedding dresses for sentimental reasons. To keep a wedding dress for years to come, be sure to save the bag it came in, have it dy cleaned after the wedding, store in a cool, dark place, and take it out once a year to breathe.
When you have a certain wedding dress in your mind then look through wedding magazines and choose several you like and then take parts of each wedding dress that appeals to you and then draw your design from these parts to make a complete wedding dress.
Yes, you can remove lace from a wedding dress, but it is best done by a professional seamstress that will have some vision as to how the wedding dress will look without the lace.
There are many places where you can take your wedding dress to be cleaned in Tampa, FL. One place that has great ratings is Pioneer Cleaners Tampa Dry Cleaning. It is located at 7204 North Florida Avenue, Tampa , FL, and the phone number is (813) 237-1021.
You can hire a seamstress to "take in" the seams on your dress.
If you are taking your wedding dress apart to make it look more like a prom dress then you could go simple without lace; bows; train (long part in the back of the wedding dress); no veiling at all. Keep the lines of the dress simple. If the wedding dress skirt was wide then you could take it in so it is more form fitting or leave it as it is without wearing the crinoline that went underneath the wedding dress. If you don't have a wedding dress and you don't want it to look like one then off the shoulder is becoming to a young woman (sleeveless of course) and it can be form fitting or have soft veiling from the waist to the ankles and most young women of today wear soft colors to their prom and not generally white.
Depending on how artsy you are, and how perfect you want it to be, the times will vary. Give your self more time if you're not sure about it.
No, you should not buy the first wedding dress you try on because there may be others that suit your body frame much better. Take a week of looking at wedding dresses off and on because trying to find a wedding dress in one day can cause you to blur your senses looking at one white wedding dress after the other. If you see a particular wedding dress you are interested in ask the shopkeeper if they can keep it on hold for a couple of days.
It depends on the dress. If you buy a pattern it usually tells you how long it takes on the packet, but I would usually times that by 2 or 3 if you're not that used to sewing. It can take anywhere between 1 hour for a simple dress to a week for a full on wedding dress/ball gown with loads of fancy bits. That is using a sawing machine. If you are sewing by hand then it'll take a lot longer.