Spurred on by her wedding date, a Finnish knitwear designer and YouTuber decided to take her dress into her own hands, literally. She came up with a delicate knitted and crocheted design and set to work creating a masterpiece.
“It was all really spontaneous, we didn’t have that much time to plan,” Lindberg said, referring to the inspiration behind her wedding dress. “First, I thought it was too stressful to make my own wedding dress. I also thought if I ordered it, it would take so long ... then I started to think, ‘Maybe I should just make it myself. I’m a designer, knitting is what I do!’”
Lindberg took a few days to sketch, design, and look for inspiration. She knew that she wanted the dress to have long sleeves and the neckline to be square-shaped. However, for the rest of the design, she said, “I saw how it would work then I would sort of design it as I went along.”
She ordered 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) of 100 percent silk yarn from Denmark and began making her dress, starting from the top and taking inspiration for lace patterns from the book, “Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible.”
Her project wasn’t without challenges.
When she first completed her bodice with the sleeves, she realized it was too big. So she had to rip it apart and repeat one day of work.
“That was a really frustrating moment,” Lindberg said. But after completing the top part of her dress, she abandoned her “Plan B” to buy a backup in case hers went wrong.
Figuring out the skirt was another challenge.
“I wanted to have movement and a nice drape,” she said. “My initial plan was to crochet that as well, [but] at some point, I realized [the crochet] was too thick so it didn’t have that movement ... I thought, ‘This is not going to work,’ and then I decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to have to knit the whole skirt!’”
Lindberg estimates that it took her almost four out of the six weeks to just make the skirt alone.
During this time, as Lindberg was knitting her dress, she and her fiancé were also in the midst of moving houses and planning the wedding.
A week before the wedding, when she'd almost completed her entire dress, she made a “mistake” and decided, on the spot, to rip a portion of her knitting open and start again.
“I felt like, ‘Oh, I just want to be done now,” she said. “That was maybe the most difficult part, [to] just keeping going.”
The knitting expert also used a trick of the trade to alleviate tension in the yarn caused by criss-cross stitching—she soaked the lace in water to soften it. “The pattern will usually bloom out; it will lay nicer and flatter so you can see the texture better,” she said. Lindberg also made a slip, by hand, to wear underneath to make the dress less transparent.
Lindberg’s fiancé had been a little skeptical from the outset, and her sister added to the sense of panic by calling often to check on dressmaking progress. But toward the end, both were impressed that Lindberg was able to pull it off.
All in all, Lindberg believes her dress took 200 hours of knitting across 45 days and cost almost $400 to make. She tried on her finished dress for the first time four days before she tied the knot in the backyard of the couple’s brand-new home on Nov. 10, 2021.
“I didn’t know how that was going to look until I really, like, finished the dress and I tried it on,” she said. “But it felt very, very nice and very special.”
“On the wedding day, everybody came to me and said, ‘Oh, this is the dress!’ and wanted to look at it and feel it.”
While the stretchy knit made Lindberg’s dress “really comfortable” to wear, she did notice one amusing detail of the heavy garment as the day wore on. “During the day it probably grew four or five centimeters! At the end of the night, the skirt was completely dirty. That was kind of funny,” she said.
Lindberg, who had been living in London since 2018, moved to Finland in 2020 at the onset of the pandemic and met her husband that same summer. They fell in love and were engaged in November 2020.
Planning a wedding was hard amid social distancing restrictions, so, when the couple finally closed on a house, they decided to make their housewarming party their wedding, too.
Lindberg described the day as “pretty informal ... a little bit bohemian and romantic,” with music, dancing, and a food truck replete with a huge pizza oven to feed the gathered crowd. Lindberg did her own makeup and wore flowers in her hair, whilst her husband wore pants and suspenders.
She also kept her phone away so that she could enjoy the day with friends and family.
“This was something I felt really excited about,” she told The Epoch Times. “For five weeks, I didn’t do any other YouTube videos because I was just focused on this ... but I feel like I learned that when I really commit to one project that is higher quality, I really put in a lot of effort.”
