‘It Felt Very Special’: Woman Designs and Knits Her Own Wedding Dress in 6 Weeks for $400

‘It Felt Very Special’: Woman Designs and Knits Her Own Wedding Dress in 6 Weeks for $400
Left: (Courtesy of Jukka Heino); Right: Courtesy of Jonas Kukkonen
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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.

Veronika Lindberg of Helsinki, Finland, who goes by the name Kika, shares her talent for knitting on her YouTube channel. She told The Epoch Times all about her “pretty crazy project.”

“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!’”

Veronika Lindberg wearing her knitted wedding dress, displaying its square-shaped neckline. (Courtesy of Jukka Heino)
Veronika Lindberg wearing her knitted wedding dress, displaying its square-shaped neckline. Courtesy of Jukka Heino

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.”

Veronika Lindberg knitting her wedding dress. (Courtesy of Veronika Lindberg)
Veronika Lindberg knitting her wedding dress. Courtesy of Veronika Lindberg

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.

A close-up of Veronica Lindberg's dress shows her sleeves. (Courtesy of Jukka Heino)
A close-up of Veronica Lindberg's dress shows her sleeves. Courtesy of Jukka Heino

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.

A close-up of Veronica's dress shows her skirt. (Courtesy of Jukka Heino)
A close-up of Veronica's dress shows her skirt. Courtesy of Jukka Heino

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.

A close-up of the bodice of Veronika's wedding dress, in progress. (Courtesy of Veronika Lindberg)
A close-up of the bodice of Veronika's wedding dress, in progress. Courtesy of Veronika Lindberg

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.”

Lindberg shared her entire dressmaking process on Instagram and YouTube. Many friends and family members had only seen the dress online before the big day.

“On the wedding day, everybody came to me and said, ‘Oh, this is the dress!’ and wanted to look at it and feel it.”

Veronika Lindberg wearing her knitted wedding dress. (Courtesy of Jukka Heino)
Veronika Lindberg wearing her knitted wedding dress. Courtesy of Jukka Heino

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.

Veronica Lindberg with her husband on their wedding day. (Courtesy of Jonas Kukkonen)
Veronica Lindberg with her husband on their wedding day. Courtesy of Jonas Kukkonen

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.

Veronika Lindberg and her husband celebrating among family and friends on their wedding day. (Courtesy of Jonas Kukkonen)
Veronika Lindberg and her husband celebrating among family and friends on their wedding day. Courtesy of Jonas Kukkonen
Since knitting her own wedding dress, Lindberg continues to make YouTube videos on knitting, digital courses in photography, and social media. She has also published a book on knitting patterns. With the success of her wedding dress, she is also considering adding more big-knit projects to her repertoire.

“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.”

Lindberg’s “mission” is to show people that knitting can be high fashion, and with a dream, a pattern, and a little determination, anyone can make a garment fit for a catwalk—or a wedding.

Watch the video:

https://youtu.be/YSOxw2H_IO8
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