Rachel Lamb Bridal Design

Well the sewing machines are cooling down as the last of the Christmas wedding dresses are finished and waved goodbye to! It's been such a busy year work-wise this year. The busiest since I left my King's Parade premises in 2008 to work at home, and then in my new garden studio in summer 2014. Thank you to everyone who wore one of my wedding dresses this year, and every previous year! I really appreciate your custom. It's more about just 'custom' though, which sounds very...impersonal. Having someone actually choose me to make their wedding dress is a huge honour and means such a lot to me. It's a responsibility I take very seriously and is difficult to explain how much it means to me, and how much care and energy, both physical and psychic I put into your dress! Also a big thank you to Lindsay and Chloe, both of whom have helped create this years dresses with me. You have both been an enormous help. :-) xx *THANK YOU EVERYONE!* If you're read...

Back in the spring, I posted something along the lines of: "This year I'm making the shortest and the biggest wedding dresses I've ever made" or some such. I also posted on Facebook about cutting out the skirts for a dress and the hems being something like 40 metres long. (I can't remember the exact length, but I had measured it, and it was certainly  very long!!) Well this is that 'biggest' and 'longest hemmed' dress and it belongs to Karen, who got married to Mark in July this summer. Before I go any further, these pictures are taken by photographer Rachel Barnes . You may have been expecting an enormous dress from my earlier comments, and although full-skirted, it's not that big to look at is it? As you can see the proportions suit Karen really well; she's got the height to go with it. I meant 'voluminous skirted'! When Karen first contacted me, she showed me a picture of a full skirt with large pleats and wan...

I'm in the mood for sketching. Here's some designs from the past weeks.

Here's some photos of bride Rachael's pretty wedding dress from earlier this year. Rachael originally chose a different dress design from my Collection, and then changed her mind half way through! She had narrowed down her selection to a couple of designs and looked great in both, which is always a tricky situation. But after asking colleagues, her mum, friends and me, she picked the design.....and then a few weeks later changed it to the one above! Luckily before I'd cut out the actual silks and lace! The dress is very similar, but not exactly the same as my Gaia dress design, which wasn't one of Rachael's original choices, although she had tried it on at her first appointment! The lace is a delicate ivory Chantilly lace over a silk base, with a tiny pearl trim under the bust-line. It fitted her like a glove, I was very pleased with the outcome. Rachael maintains (still, in a recent email) that she was a 'Bridezilla' because she...

I've entered a bridal supplier competition!!! I don't normally do this sort of thing. To be honest, I'm just too shy mostly. However I've bitten the bullet and entered a regional competition: The Four Counties Wedding Awards . If I've made your dress in the last 12 months and you would like to vote for me, please do so! My entry is mainly about customer service and going the extra mile. I will be very grateful :-) Just click on the badge to the right there, and follow the links to vote. Voting closes at midnight on the 31st Oct. Thank you! xxx

image by alanmillerphotography.com Every once in a while I am asked to make something a bit different, and back in the springtime, Sherie set me a brief for a vibrant coloured dress (with pockets) that could be worn again for other events, and this is the result. I love this dress! Sherie wore her own cuff-links with the dress, and it has a bright green lining inside the skirt, which sadly I don't have any pictures of, but you'll have to take my word for it! The first and last images by photographer Alan Miller , and the ones in between are my work in progress shots. I hope you like it. image by alanmillerphotography.com

This is springtime bride Julie (and her husband), who, as the title suggests, wore a sage green silk dress with a vintage-y looking nude/oyster coloured lace overlay. When Julie first came to see me, she wasn't looking for anything traditionally bridal in colour, and was originally thinking of  a richer blue or green colour, with comfort being a priority for her. We looked at a few green and blue laces but none hit the spot, so I suggested that she go on an exploration of some of the fabric shops in London to see if anything caught her eye. (I often send people off with a list of potential shops if I have nothing in the studio that matches their ideas.) It did, and Julie came back with a small piece of the lace she'd found to show me, but as I recall, there wasn't much of it left on the roll in the shop. We discussed and revised the design again and I advised her to buy the remaining piece of lace and said that I would draft the dress pattern to fit in with t...

This year I've made the fullest and the shortest wedding dresses that I've ever done! This is Mandy who knew from the off that she wanted a mini dress and it was to be white lace. After a small amount of searching we went for a white Guipure lace from Harrington Fabric & Lace . It's a simple design but actually took a reasonable amount of time to make because there's quite a bit of hand-sewing to secure the lace. It was amusing during the fittings because I started off with quite a modest length and Mandy wanted it to be shorter at each fitting! At the final hem fitting we did a sit-down test to make sure all was decent and this was the finished length! :-)

Okay, so my last post was in March and it's now September. Oops! Oh well, it's been an extremely busy wedding season for me, and as a result, making the dresses, family and sleep have to come before social networking! Now things have calmed down I have a lot of dresses that I want to show you, kindly sent to me by my recent clients. (I also haven't finished showing the dresses that were photographed at the beginning of the year either. All in good time.) I thought I'd start by showing you a wedding from back in the early spring, although you wouldn't know it from the photos as the wedding was in Florida! This is Laura-Jean and her chap, looking lovely and windswept on their wedding day. Laura-Jean's dress was ivory hand appliquéd lace with tulle skirts and lots of roped beading. More to show you soon.

Love, love, love this dress! This is another of my new Collection dresses called Elsa. It's a very simple and easy to wear dress, brilliant if you don't want to feel like your dress is wearing you, or for a simple country wedding or small venue perhaps? Elsa is made from several layers of silk Georgette in the skirt and has a boned silk bodice overlaid with hand-cut Guipure lace. We love this lace because it has a lovely irregular edge. The pictures for all this shoot were taken by Andrew from Lightworks Photography . Before I forget, it's the Secret Garden Wedding Marquee Open Day at Burwash Manor tomorrow. It's a lovely venue so do pop along and have a look if you don't have a venue yet. Andrew from Lightworks will be there too so go and say hello to him too!

Good afternoon, how are you? I am very busy these days, which is wonderful! Thank you to all my brides for your bookings this year! xx Here is another of my new (ish) Collection wedding dresses. I say new-ish because I'm not sure I've had this one photographed before and it hasn't had much exposure, so it still feels new to me. It's named Rosa, for obvious reasons. I'm lucky because I get quite a lot of variety in the dresses I'm asked to make, especially a variety of colours. However, ivory remains the most popular colour within the dresses I design. Anyway, I decided to combine the two and design a dress with a colourful print combined with a dark ivory silk. The printed bust section is a cotton print. My thinking behind it is that you could combine any printed fabric with a more traditional bridal colour, as in this dress, to come up with something that is unique to you. The other option would be to replace the printed section with a tonal l...

Here's another of my new dresses, Clementine. Named for obvious reasons perhaps? Obvious to me, because these days I need the names of the dresses to instantly remind me of the actual dress! I really wanted to make an orangey wedding dress, but when it came down to it the colours were too orange, so I toned it down a bit and went for a softer, salmon-like colour instead. This type of dress could also be made in ivory or white, or any colour really - it's the lace colour that determines the main colour-way because it's likely that a lace will have a narrower colour choice than the main silk of the dress. (I think it would look good as a white dress with black lace too.) I hitched up the silk on this skirt because I like the texture it gives, but it can also be made as a smooth skirt and train if you prefer. I hope you like it. :-)

Eleanor Eleanor Eleanor Eleanor Here's another of my new designs from my Collection. I love this dress, it's called Eleanor and is simple and classic with just a little bit of lace on the bust section. The waist section is ruched silk Taffeta and the skirt is hitched and bunched-up (technical terms there) silk Organza over more silk. As with almost all of my dresses, the design can be changed to suit you. For example, it could be made without the cap sleeves, with longer sleeves or as a strapless dress. Or perhaps in a different colour? You could also choose not to bunch up the Organza overlay and to have it smooth instead. The best thing is to just chat with me about what you are thinking of, and we can go from there. However, I do love it as it is!