Making Your Veil is Totally Worth It!

You'll need minimal supplies to make your own veil, depending on how elaborate you want to make your embellishments (if any). After some trial and error, I modified this tutorial to shape my veil and followed this one to attach my hair comb.

Begin by measuring your tulle. Wearing my dress, I tied some yarn to my hair comb, placed it where I wanted on my head, and had my Mom cut it to the right length for my dress. This lead me to purchase 3 yards of 108" wide tulle for a cathedral length. I then used that yarn to measure the full length of my veil and trimmed the excess.

Fold your veil in half lengthwise and use some more yarn to create a curve at the bottom. Make sure that the curve rises up to the unfolded edge! Tulle is tricky to work with so you'll need to use lots of pins to get an even edge.

The next step is to gather the veil using two rows of a basic running stitch starting about 2 inches from the top edge.  Leave long tails of thread on either side of the tulle and gently pull on the threads to gather the tulle. Keep gathering until that portion is as wide as your hair comb.

The amount of pouf is determined by how long your rows of stitches are, ie. how much tulle is being gathered. For a lot of pouf, stitch along the entire top edge. For some side veil, leave 20-40 inches on either side of your rows of stitches. Trim the excess and then stitch to your comb.

 

I began by gathering along the entire top edge of my tulle and attaching the veil to the underside of the comb, so the veil comes up and over the hair comb and your raw edge of tulle is hidden. I decided this was too much pouf and the weight of the veil was dragging the comb out of my hair. Back to the drawing board!

I found clear hair combs with a flat edge at Michaels which worked much better than the tortishell combs I just happened to have lying around the house. To increase the sheerness of the veil and cut down on pouf, I only gathered 10 inches of tulle (5 inches on either side of the centre) to fit on my 2.5 inch wide comb. The side edges were rounded by folding the tulle in half and using yarn again to make a curve. Lastly, I wrapped the edge of the comb with some scrap tulle and then sewed the gathered portion of the veil to the top of the comb.

Done! The top of the comb is pretty neat looking but you could always add some ribbon, crystals or even silk flowers to cover up the stitches. I'll probably add some ivory beads to the top side of the comb for a bit of detail.

My mom is very keen on adding crystals along the length of the veil, but before we do that I need to try it on with my dress to make sure the length and overall shape are right. 

This turned out exactly how I imagined! So far I'm on a roll with my DIY projects :)