What I Did with My Wedding Dress!

Where’s your wedding dress?

If you’re like most women, it’s carefully preserved, in a box, taking up loads of valuable storage space somewhere in your house. Or maybe it’s just hanging in your closet — still taking up equally as much storage space. Or maybe it’s in the attic, or the basement, or the garage, or…

Wherever it is, there’s a pretty good chance you will never wear it again.

You’re just storing it… because!

A wedding dress is one of those HUGE pieces of emotional clutter and while I don’t think you’re a bad person for hanging onto your wedding dress; I do want to challenge you to think about other alternatives to simply storing it for years without a purpose.

I often get asked what I did with my wedding dress, and I figured this time of year would be a good time to get a little wedding dress discussion going on!

So what did I do with my dress?

I cut it up!

Well, actually, I tried to sell it on Craigslist for $90 {which is what we originally paid for it} but I guess people don’t want to buy a used wedding dress.

So then, I decided to cut up the fabric — with intention of using that fabric to make baptism outfits for our children…someday.

The whole process took about twenty minutes, it was virtually painless {seriously it was!}, and I now have a pile of gorgeous fabric that takes up WAY less space than a wedding dress. Oh,  and I’ll eventually have another use for it once we have kids!

The picture below is a pile of the scraps that I cut off. Look how dirty the hem was!

So now, my “wedding dress” is stored in a very small, Space Saver bag that hardly takes up any room at all. It’s actually in the bottom of my dresser drawer with sweaters on top.

And I donated the poofy lining that was under the dress to Goodwill. I suspect some little girls are having a great time playing dress-up!

I was a teeny tiny bit hesitant right before I made my first cut, and I DID try the dress on one time before I cut it up {it was a little tight, but it still fit.}  Over all, I’m so happy to have all that extra space and to know that I’ve created another use for my wedding dress.

So what did you do with your wedding dress?

And for all the girls getting married this Spring and Summer, do you have any creative ideas for your dress after the wedding?

Does anyone know of a specific place to donate wedding dresses — or any charities that you could give them to?

UPDATE:

Here are a bunch of other really clever ways to repurpose a wedding dress.

This is the adorable little baptism outfit I made for Simon out of some of my wedding dress fabric!