Silver Wedding Card–In Retrospect

Looking back over my blog posts of the last year, I realised that I never did a post about the silver wedding card I made for my hubby – it was a very busy year anyway, and also, I got so carried away with his present that it got overlooked. I thought you might like to see what I did.

I designed and made my own wedding dress, and after 25 years, there were still scraps of fabric in my bits box, so I decided to incorporate these into the design, along with some embroidery to mirror that on my dress.

Here’s a picture of me on our wedding day with my dad, to show the dress.

(You can see the rest of the wedding photos here.)

The dress was made of white moiré taffeta with pale blue satin accents. The design was inspired by a variety of influences, but mainly Russian. My father made a wire frame for me to construct the headdress around. The detachable collar was inspired by Thai dancers’ costumes, and the embroidery, worked in several shades of blue pure silk floss, incorporated Indian shi-sha mirrors. The band around the waist was smocked with the blue silk floss, and the blue satin “straps,” also embroidered, were attached at the waist only. Under the skirt was a hooped crinoline petticoat with several layers of net, and the sleeves were also puffed up with ruched net attached to the sleeve linings. There was further embroidery in the blue silk floss over the shoulders and at the wrists, and the hem of the dress was finished with a narrow silver braid. The veil was plain white net with tiny silver sequins sewn onto it.

Here are the materials I selected to make the card.

The pieces for the front of the card I cut with Jiminy Cricut, using some dark blue cardstock and silver mirror card, cutting an oval aperture for the embroidery, our initials in two entwined hearts and, of course, the number 25.

I matted and layered the component pieces for the hearts, initials and numbers to form the embellishments for the card.

You can see on the silver mirror card for the heart piece that I have hand-embossed the outlines where they cross, to give the impression of two pieces interlocking.

Here is the heart motif attached to the matted and layered aperture of the card.

These are the materials for the embroidery. You can see the central motif in progress.

You can see that I have outlined the central white moiré taffeta shape with chain stitch worked in silver, onto a background of pale blue satin. On the right you can see some Indian shi-sha mirrors waiting to be attached. For this project I used pure silk floss in three shades of blue. This was given to me by someone who got a huge quantity from a convent which was closing down. It is fabulous with a wonderful sheen to it, but absolute murder to work with as the fine silk fibres catch on everything, including the slightest roughness on one’s skin. Sewing down the small mirror fragments with their rough edges was very difficult – I had to cover the edge with a fingernail as I pulled the thread through each time, and there was a risk of the thread breaking.

I then worked three lines of chain stitch in the three shades of blue silk floss to attach the lace to the moiré taffeta for the background, trimming back the taffeta under the lace.

This piece was then laid over a piece of dull silver card and attached around the edges with double-sided tape.

The embroidered motif was attached with chain stitch in silver thread.

The final touch was to add a fringe of small tear-drop shaped silver beads along the border of chain stitch silk embroidery.

Here is the completed card, with the embellishments attached to the front and the embroidery in the aperture. The whole thing was matted and layered onto a sheet of the dull silver card. I stuck on a matching piece for the back of the card, and made a card insert with a verse.

Here is the card with the shadow box I made as a present for my hubby, showing them to have the same colour scheme.

I have made a video slideshow of the construction of this card rather than a video as such, because watching someone doing all that embroidery would be like watching paint dry!