Colored Wedding Dress Crinolines + Part 1: DIY Colored Crinoline

via

My favorite thing to see on wedding blogs (besides chuppahs!) is a bride with a colored crinoline. Some brides are women who wanted a colored dress but for whatever reason ended up with a white one. The colored crinoline is a way to wear a pop of the color in a fun way.
I originally wanted a yellow / green dress. Yellow is just my color!

via

We all know I ended up with a (most beautiful) ivory dress so I immediately wanted to adopt this detail into my own style for the Day. Problem is... finding these is no easy task!
When searching you are faced with 3 options: Have a short dress, pay the price or buy a white one to dye! Having a short dress is by far the easiest option. There's no shortage of pettiskirts and square dancing petticoats the perfect length! Here's one superb website I found. 

Swank Underpinnings

Good old etsy has a few shops that cater to the colored-crinoline bride. The prices aren't too* bad but $0 is my budget, sooo...! One excellent shop is Swank Underpinnings. They range between $35 to $225 (custom orders!). They make them in all lengths, which is really not easy to find. Some of her custom stuff--swoon!
Loca Loves Pirate has some cutie pastel babies, too. They're even full length!

So what's a budget-spent bride to do?! It involved massive preparation research, scissors, and blind faith. A couple weekends ago when I was making our invitations, I asked my mom to enlist in helping me cut my crinoline out of my dress. With scissors. She surprisingly did not look at me like I was too crazy, but we both felt aprehensive about the whole thing. If I had thought about it much more, I wouldn't have done it.

Steps

1. Put on your dress.
2. Have a helper pull up the top layer(s) so that you can only see the crinoline layer.
3. Make a guide snip at waist-height where you'll be cutting accross the crinoline.
4. Take off the dress.
5. Lay out the dress on the bed and pull all the layers up over the top of the dress, making sure the only layer exposed is the crinoline layer.
6. Just like with cutoff shorts, find your guide snip. Now read: DO NOT CUT THROUGH BOTH LAYERS. ONE LAYER AT A TIME ONLY.
7. Just like with cut off shorts, cut in a straight line across the front.
8. Flip the dress over. You'll see why you don't cut through both layers.
9. The back of a wedding dress is almost always where it zips, laces, yada yadas... and there will be a panel back there you don't want to cut that separates the dress closure from your bare skin. So taking care to cut AROUND that part, Cut straight across the back, around the panel and back straight across to finish.
10. Pull out your crinoline, hang your dress back up and committ yourself. Not to your fiance(e)... To an asylum. You're officially NUTS for doing this DIY.

The second part of the DIY is dying and the third is adding an elastic waistband so you can wear it under your dress. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3!
In the meantime, there is a whole SECTION of Offbeat Bride that features just weddings with colored-crinoline brides. Enjoy!