That week I remember just sitting at home. I sat for ages and I couldn’t think about any of the other orders I had. I came close to telling Mary that I couldn’t do it and offering to give her the money back. Then it occurred to me that because Mary knew so many people, if she told them I didn’t do it, there was a good chance that it might ruin my reputation with the other travellers.
But what really persuaded me was young Mary’s excitement about the whole thing. I couldn’t stop thinking about this young kid getting married, and how it was all booked, and how she thought she was going to have the best dress ever with this massive train.
It took me that whole week to work out in my head how to start. At first I just couldn’t understand what she was asking for. I’d never seen a wedding dress anything like that size. I kept thinking, ‘That girl’s got a lovely figure. Why would she want something this size? It’s ridiculous.’ Eventually, I thought, ‘I’m wasting time here. Just do it. You’ve just got to go for it. Just do it.’
I couldn’t buy a commercial pattern because there weren’t any for a dress like that. So I looked at all my costume books to see how they pulled the skirt fabric into the waist. Also, young Mary, whom I’d measured by then, had a 24-inch waist. And she wanted the best satin, not any thin fabric; it had to be Duchess satin, which is really heavy. But that’s what I reckoned the Victorians would have used, so I looked at the way they did it and copied it. I also knew that there was only so much fabric I could fit into a tiny waistband.
Then I started to think, ‘Where am I going to fit this dress?’ I couldn’t do it in the market. So Gypsy Mary came to my flat. She’d usually come with young Mary and three of her other girls in tow – two of the older ones who were going to be bridesmaids, and Josephine, always Josephine. Quite often she would end up staying all day at the flat, making tea and cooking dinner for everyone so that I could carry on making the dresses. Mary was always telling me stories about traveller culture. I was fascinated. I began to look forward to her visits.
‘This dress has got to be fantastic,’ she’d say. ‘There are people coming from all over to this wedding, from America, everywhere. There will be 500 people there, so it’s got to be really good.’
The pressure was ramping up, but the good thing was that I could count on Angela and Audrey to help me. We had another Audrey helping at that time too. So there was me in my flat, with Mary and the kids, the two Audreys working in their houses and Angela in hers. Everyone worked on different bits, and then I would collect them all and piece them together at my flat. The girls also did the bridesmaids’ dresses. That’s how I’d worked out was the best way to do it, because there was physically not enough space to fit all these dresses into my flat. Especially that wedding dress.
The fabric was sixty inches wide, which is the widest you can get, but that still wasn’t quite wide enough, so I had to fathom how to stitch panels together to get a fuller effect. I was working on a dressmaker’s dummy, but the skirts were so heavy that it was bending over. Every time I tried to put the underskirts on, the dummy collapsed. I thought of every way I could to try to make it work.
I went back to my books and had a really good look at the Victorian crinolines. They were all held up by big whalebone cages, so I thought, ‘I’ll make a cage out of stiff fabric and steel strips, and if I have some going this way and some going that, it should carry the weight.’ But it collapsed: the steel wasn’t strong enough.
I even tried making a sample on a smaller scale, and it seemed to work, but when I tried it bigger, it didn’t. God, when I think of all the ways I tried to get around it. I remember one morning seeing the dummy all bent over and doubled up. Finally I decided to try it on one of the girls, and it was actually OK. On a body it was sticking out exactly as I wanted. It worked.
And then there was the train.
In my head that was going to be the easy part. After all, as Mary said, essentially it was ‘just a long piece of fabric’. But it wasn’t easy at all – and it wasn’t just one long strip of fabric, either. It was thick satin and I had to do it in panels. Now, after trying to fit the huge, heavy skirts on to the dress, here I was with this massive train having to go on the waist as well. Can you imagine all that having to be supported by this tiny girl’s 24-inch waist?
The train was so heavy it was pushing the dress forward, so I had to devise something to make it come out and over the dress. I went back to my books and decided that a bustle – a frame often used to support heavy fabric dresses in the 1800s – might be the best solution. It was trial-and-error time again.
Dave, as ever, was amazing: ‘Come on, you can do it,’ he’d say. ‘You know you can do it. You’ll work it out.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can. I’ll help you.’
And he did. Dave always helped me make things happen.
The funny thing is, I get so many calls from people today asking how I make the dresses – ‘How do you do this bit? How can I make my bodices stay like that?’
‘You chancer!’ I want to reply. ‘It took me years to work all this stuff out. Do you think I’m just going to tell you over the phone in two minutes?’ But, of course, I just politely tell them that it’s best that they work it out for themselves as every design is different and our dresses won’t be the same as theirs.
We put the bustle under the train so that it kept the fabric up and off the back of the dress, but as soon as the girl moved in it the dress bent back in again.
Then Mary came in to see her daughter’s dress one day. She wanted more crystals on it, and I was still buying them retail as I didn’t know a supplier. So I bought two packets of Swarovski crystals – about 3,000 of them – which seemed like loads, and scattered them all over the dress.
‘Oh, no, that’s not enough, Thelma,’ she said. So I got some more.
Another day, young Mary looked at the dress. ‘I want something round the edge of the trail,’ she said. ‘I want some edging.’ Of course, she didn’t want to pay any extra for it – her mum, Gypsy Mary, was a good teacher in that respect. So I sat there night after night, stitching the edge of this train with organza and crystals – all 107 feet of it.
Finally, it was done and it was really, really heavy. In the end, I thought, ‘I’ve done what I can and that’s what she wanted. If it collapses, it collapses. There’s nothing I can do.’
But it was me who collapsed. I got really ill, probably with exhaustion. Then I got bronchitis.
Mary turned up at the house one day when I was not at all well. ‘Thelma,’ she said, ‘I want you to do an outfit for my other daughter.’
‘I can’t, Mary,’ I said. ‘Honestly, I’m just physically not up to it.’
‘Oh, it’ll be an easy one,’ she said. ‘The wedding dress is nearly done now.’
So I ended up having to do another outfit for the after-party as well. Those three months of my life were hell. I remember sitting there thinking, ‘I will never ever make another wedding dress so long as I live.’
Dave and me were invited to the wedding, but we couldn’t go as it was in Peterborough and it would have been impossible to get back in time to do the market the following day. I remember the day the family came to pick up the dresses. It was the afternoon before the wedding and I’d worked right through the night making sure it was perfect, and at about four o’clock Dave put everything in their van. As they left, Mary called me to one side.
‘Don’t tell anyone what the dress is like, or the colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses,’ she whispered. ‘And don’t mention where the wedding is.’
‘OK, Mary,’ I said. ‘That must