To start, I needed to find a nice fabric with pretty embroidered flowers that I couild cut out to make lace appliques. I searched fabric shops high and low before coming across this. If you have access to Amazon you'll probably be luckier than me. AI search this photo and you'll probably find something just like this that can be shipped to you. My problem was that the store was already sold out of the versions with nude or white backing. I was debating buying the above version which has a yellow backing when they found a random 80 cm left over piece of the nude backed version and I bought it immediately.

I took this photo for my friend as soon as I bagged it. Very exciting! You can see the edge of a bright orange flower - those were the only flowers I didn't use at all on the veil. I used every other piece.

A clearer pic of some of the details. Love the colours.

Cutting the lace out is a bit nightmarish. I started out snipping around them with small scissors and it was taking forever so I moved to a board of wood with my craft knife. I free handed lines around the flowers and leaves to cut them out. I sliced my finger once, please be more careful than me! I've seen that some people do this with a wood burning tool but I didn't have access to one.

The veil was purchased on Shein. They were so reasonably priced that I bought two from different vendors, one in white and one in cream to see what matched my dress better. The cream won hands down and was better quality, fuller, and all round nicer. It was cathedral length which is longer than I wanted for the flowers so I had to decide where I wanted to cut it. I wanted it to lie slightly on top of my train so the flowers would stand out against the white of my dress. I ended up cutting about 60 cm off the bottom, matching the exact curve of the original veil.

Bonus pic of my lovely cat trying to help. Cat claws and tulle are not a good mix. 3/10 would not recommend a handsy supurrvisor.

Once all the pieces were cut out I needed to figure out how on earth I'd attach everything without a big studio to work in. The wall was an anxiety-fuelled 3 am stroke of genius. I drilled a hole near the ceiling and screwed in a hook. I then tied the veil loosely to that hook.

I stuck three glue-backed rubber chair leg pads to the wall where I needed the veil to stretch out and pinned the veil to those so that it spread out nicely. I then started pinning the flowers to the veil.

I knew I wanted the illusion of flowers growing up along the peak of the middle of the veil, along with two smaller peaks of flowers on either side, so I started with those. There was no formal plan, just a lot of pinning something on, looking at it through my camera to get an idea of how it looks overall, and then repeating.

I used a knockoff of E6000 fabric glue, and it's working surprisingly well. Fabric glue will make your life a lot easier as sewing the appliques on take a lot of time and can pull the fabric if you use too much tension.