Muhammad Ali was a man known, if you ignore his talent in the ring, for his rhyming taunts of his opponents in the lead up to a boxing bout. Before the 1975 “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman, he told the press that his preparations for the fight had been different to his usual routine. This time, he said, “I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.” He was – and, in the view of many, remains – a great fighter who would never take a backward step (unless, of course, it was part of a strategy). For all his abilities, though, I think I could take him after this week. Perhaps not in the ring – I’m not suggesting that even now when he is racked with Parkinson’s disease that I could ever go toe-to-toe with him – but in other fields, sure. Because although Ali wrestled an alligator, he never, so far as I am aware, wrangled bridal tulle.
This is what a wedding dress looks like during alterations. Of course, this is just a tiny fraction of my work table… Which in this case is actually my 6ft dining table, covered half a meter deep with fabric.
A casualty of war. Many pins fell by the wayside, unable to survive the rigours of tulle combat.
Whoever came up with the idea of a net fabric that seems lighter than air as a dress fabric was either insane, or never sewed themselves. And that’s before you factor in the varying degrees of slipperiness, stiffness and prickle. Insanity is the only reason I can think of for using the fabric in the first place. Sure, the final result can be pretty, no doubt the reason that brides throughout the western world keep returning to it generation after generation. But the process for getting there is painful. Just attempting to work around it to take up the hem of a wedding dress at the moment has caused no end of grief. There are two outer layers of soft tulle on the skirt, which I think would probably come in as a triple circle, and a further three layers of underskirt. Sandwiched between that is the taffeta layer and then there is another lining layer. The diminutive bride in this case will need an aisle at least 2 metres across just to fit her dress.. The hemming process took an entire day, to get around roughly a third of the hem (the rest doesn’t require alteration). It probably would have been quicker if I wasn’t working by hand, but I was. Space constraints wouldn’t let me get close to a sewing machine with this dress. So I spent a day doing metres and metres of hand rolled hem. Today I’m doing the rest of it.
But that’s not my only tulle at the moment. The same wedding involves a flower girl dress, designed to tie in with the wedding dress. More tulle. Thankfully not quite as much, but just cutting the pattern and managing the double layer of floaty stuff was enough to mess with my head this week, not to mention with my ludicrously sensitive skin. I’m pleased with the finished result, but left with what will no doubt become a life-long aversion to tulle. Enough that I would almost rather time travel back to Kinshasa in 1975 to face George Foreman at his peak than to risk another explosion of netting. Yet, just as Ali beat Foreman, I can sense that I am winning my fight against the dread stuff. And I haven’t even needed to rope-a-dope.
The knock-out blow…
The Lady Sews 