12. Hundreds of Tiny Stitches

This is the back of the lace panel of the dress. Mom spent 3 weeks hand appliquéing the lace motifs to a panel of silk that she had custom-dyed brown. People may rant about how ridiculous it is to pay $25,000 for a couture dress, but now I don't think that price is so crazy. My mom spent 3 weeks hand-embroidering less than a third of a yard of fabric. Some couture dresses are covered in this sort of handwork, and the people who make them are experts in their field who are paid accordingly. The only reason the heavily embroidered Big White Dresses (BWDs) you see at various Bridal Barns are affordable for your average middle-class Josephine is because they are machine embroidered, and made in vast factories in China by people whose entire yearly income (or five-year income) would not be enough to purchase one of the BWDs they make.