The beginning of a custom wedding dress

As I said in my earlier post, my friend Alyssa, whom I am designing a wedding dress for, came from Indiana to visit so we can start working on the dress. It was a jam packed visit! We did a lot of research, trying on various dresses, knocked out the design and did some fabric shopping.Here's some pics of different dresses she tried on to get an idea of what we both liked and what we didn't like:

We also thumbed through a few bridal magazines and surfed the net to get inspiration and here are a few images we liked:

Based on the dresses tried on and the images we went through, I started whipping up some rough sketches and thinking about how to construct the dress:

After a few more sketches here is the final design sketched out in color:

And then the fabrics we decided on:

The beaded trim in the left hand corner is going to be used on the back of the dress, the heavy satin in ivory on the top right is going underneath the lighter ivory fabric which is to the left of it and will give the dress the flow we are looking for.

Possibly this will be used for the beading around the neckline? Not sure yet.

I am going to start making the dress in the next month or sometime around there...Keep you posted on the details!