Here’s my hard-working wedding kit–with the famous tape right on top!
Sometimes I get to do the funniest things in my job as a wedding planner and coordinator. You never know what the day is going to throw at you or what you will need to solve a problem. That’s why I always have a wide variety of tools and supplies at hand on a wedding day.
At one wedding recently, the bride’s beautiful white dress developed a problem. The wedding party had just returned from taking photos after the ceremony, and they were lining up for introductions into the reception. That was when the bride told me that her dress wasn’t bustling properly and she was afraid she would trip on it.
I took a quick look at the back of her dress, and it was about as bad as anyone could have imagined. The loop that went over the button to create the bustle had torn right out of the very delicate, sheer organza fabric of her overdress and train. There was a definite hole there, and the train was hanging down asymmetrically–and was definitely likely to trip her up if it wasn’t fixed.
Now, I have just enough experience working with fabric to know that if you try to put a needle and thread through a hole in organza, you are just going to end up shredding the fabric further. There is really no point in trying to sew it back together if you can’t patch it first–and we were on too tight a schedule for that. But if you can’t sew it, what can you do??
I took three steps over to my emergency kit and picked up a roll of white fabric tape (known among stage managers as spike tape for its theatrical uses) and walked back to the bride and her torn dress. One piece of half-inch wide tape went through the thread loop and back down into the hole in the dress. A second piece of tape wrapped around the first piece and around the fabric to hold it in place. The thread loop went back over the button and–poof!–the dress was back in one piece.
If you looked really closely, you could see the repair, but I could see that it was good enough for presentation purposes. And, as I said to the bride, if anyone was looking anywhere but at her beautiful, smiling face, they were looking in the wrong place.
Later, the bride’s mother borrowed a needle and thread from me (because, of course, I have those in my kit, as well) to try to make a more formal repair. But she just ended up confirming my conclusion that repairing organza with a needle is pretty much a lost cause without special skills and/or equipment.
I have to say, I felt pretty triumphant at having such a quick fix close to hand. It’s nice to save the day from time to time!
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