Your wedding dress is the most important dress you’ll ever wear, though there’s nothing worse than the thought of stowing it away where it’ll only gather dust.
On the other hand, taking a pair of scissors to your wedding gown is an equally scary concept for many of us.
However, if you don’t want to sell your dress or give it away, but you’re also scared about it being crammed into a box where nobody can appreciate it, how about recycling it into a keepsake that you can cherish forever?
There are so many ways to repurpose your wedding dress, but we’ve picked out our favorite ideas below…
A Clutch
You’ll attend plenty more weddings over the years, as well as other events that call for equally glamorous outfits, and for these, why not have some of your wedding dress made into a clutch bag?
This works especially well with satin dresses, and you can even add a handle made out of pearls for a delicate touch. If you don’t think you’ll wear a white or ivory clutch, you could even dye the fabric a color of your choice!
Christening Gown
One of the sweetest things to recreate with your wedding dress is a christening gown for your children – or other children in your family – to wear. Classic wedding dress designs with lots of traditional elements like lace and embroidery work particularly well for this, plus you’ll be designing something completely unique.
Table runner
Why not transform your wedding dress into a table runner that you can use to decorate your table for special dinner parties and holiday dinners? This way, it can be enjoyed by the whole family, and you’ll still get to remember your special day. You can either keep it white or dye it a color that matches the rest of your decor.
Ideas for altering vintage wedding dress to prevent overproduction of clothes. Closeup wedding dressmaker sewing beautiful clothes from old wedding dress. Thrifted wedding dress concept.
Baby blanket
Children love smooth fabrics like satin or silk, so why not transform your wedding dress into a baby blanket? This way your little one can always hold a piece of you close to them. This’ll work best with silk or satin as they’re stronger, but lace can also work.
Jewellery
If you want to use a minimal amount of fabric from your dress, or you intend to use the majority of it for a different project, you can save little pieces to be made into beautiful keepsake jewellery.
Save pieces of the lace, or some of the embellishments from your dress, and have them set into jewelry. This works particularly well for pendants or brooches, but they can even be made into earrings and rings.
You can do this yourself if you have jewelry-making experience, or seek out a small business specializing in upcycling cherished possessions. Then you can wear the pieces yourself, or gift them to a beloved child or grandchild in the future.
Christmas Ornament
If you’re somebody who loves collecting symbolic Christmas ornaments, you’ll love this idea of taking a few pieces of lace from your wedding gown and adding it to a simple Christmas bauble to hang on your Christmas tree every year. You can also add delicate gold or red flowers, which will look perfect with the white lace.
This is a simple and easy project, and it only uses a small amount of material, allowing you to make some more ornaments, or use the rest of the fabric for another project.
Ottoman
The luxurious nature of wedding dress fabric makes it perfect for repurposing into a new piece of furniture to add a touch of glamor to your bedroom. Why not head to the local flea market and see what you can find?
Our favorite idea is to reupholster an ottoman with your dyed wedding gown and to dye it a dusty rose or silvery gray – it’ll look perfect at your vanity table.
Christmas Stockings
If you’re looking for an easy project that will take less than a day, why not consider creating Christmas stockings out of your wedding gown? They’ll look perfect trimmed with snowy white fur or red ribbon, and can be further decorated with sequins and embroidery any way you wish.
You’ll get to remember your special day every year when the stockings are hung from the mantle or on the stairs, and you’ll have the added joy of watching family members retrieve gifts from inside.
Bouquet Wrap
There’s nothing more sentimental than turning your wedding dress into something that can be used by a loved one on their wedding day. Creating keepsakes for your children’s weddings, like a bouquet wrap, is the perfect way to give your dress a new lease of life.
If you have multiple children, why not make something for each of them? They can then freeze-dry their bouquet to hang in a shadow box with the bouquet wrap or save it as a keepsake for their children to one day use.
Memory Quilt
By turning your dress into a beautiful quilt, you can appreciate the fabric every day. You might require some extra fabric to do it, and it may take a while to complete, but the end result will be a quilt you’ll treasure for years to come.
Plus this is another project that could be passed down as a family heirloom as well.
Throw Pillow
A pillow is a perfect way to transform your dress into something decorative that you’ll enjoy and appreciate on a daily basis. You can leave the fabric as it is, dye it your favorite color, or decorate and embellish it in any way you wish.
Keepsake Wall Art
This is another one of our favorite ideas. You can have a piece of your wedding dress framed to remember your special day forever. You can also have it embroidered with your names and wedding day date.
