My grandmother taught me how to knit when I was five years old, and ever since then, it has been one of my biggest passions in life.
In 2017, I started an Instagram account to share pictures of my knitting and launched my own YouTube channel a year later, where I've recently been sharing tutorials on knitting for beginners.
In late June, my partner and I decided to get married, and immediately, I thought it would be so cool to knit my own wedding dress and document the experience for a YouTube video, even thoughI only had about six weeks until our wedding date in September, so I could tell it was going to be a stressful ordeal.
I felt this had the potential to be the most epic YouTube video ever though, so I ordered 30 balls of white pure silk yarn for roughly $290, and got to work.
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The process wasn't always easy, but it was worth it to create my dream dress and share it with my viewers in what became the most popular YouTube video I've ever posted.
The dress took 45 days to make and there were many challenges along the way
Despite being a knitting content creator, I had never knitted a dress before this. I was actually quite hesitant about the concept of it because I worried it would look like a pajama dress and not have any shape to it.
A lot of knitted dresses I've seen look a bit granny-ish, but I wanted something that was more haute couture, so I went on Pinterest and looked up different dress designs from Christian Dior and Chanel, and decided to try and create a dress inspired by those designs, but made from silk yarn. I had such a specific vision of it in my mind, and I used an existing skirt I had made to give me an idea of how I wanted it to fall around my hips and legs.
For the next 45 days, I practically did nothing other than knit. It took me around 200 hours to finish the design, and I had to put all other video ideas on hold while I concentrated on this one project. This was the longest amount of time I'd ever spent on a video, and it was quite challenging having to stay on top of making the dress and remembering to document key moments at the same time.
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Although I had enough self-belief to feel that I would pull it off in the end, plenty of things went wrong during the knitting process.
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About two weeks in, I had finished the bodice but tried it on and found out it was way too big for me. I ended up having to rip it back up and start all over again. When I made the sleeves, they kept slipping down and exposing my chest, so that was pretty funny and took me a while to fix.
I made sure to film all my mistakes so I could be real and honest with my viewers, rather than only showing them the picture-perfect moments.
By the time I finished the dress, I felt so tired and frustrated, and only had four days to rest until the day of the wedding. But when I put it on for the ceremony, I felt such relief, and I could not have been happier with the finished product.
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My partner, who was initially a bit skeptical about how achievable it would be for me to make an entire dress in such a short space of time, thought it looked great as well.
Over the course of the day, guests would come up to me and immediately feel the dress and comment on it. It sometimes felt like they were more interested in the dress than in me, but I love talking about knitting, so I didn't mind too much.
Knitting is such a big part of my life, so I'm glad that I was able to make it an important part of my wedding day.
I hope my YouTube video shows how sophisticated and fashionable knitwear can be
A couple of weeks after the wedding, I posted a 46-minute vlog about the dress-making process. Editing it took four days and putting it together was such an emotional experience for me. I was able to relive the experience and my wedding day all over again because of it.
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The vlog is now my most-watched video with nearly 3 million views, and I'm glad that spending so much time on producing a longer, higher-quality video actually paid off.
I was delighted to see how positively people reacted to it, and that it's inspired some commenters to make their own wedding dresses one day (which I definitely think is possible for people with less knitting experience, I would just recommend that they give themselves closer to six months than six weeks!).
I think the success of the video has really fuelled my own personal mission to debunk the myth that knitting is something that only grannies in rocking chairs do.
In recent years, knitwear has become fashionable again, with more brands trying to modernize knitting designs for the younger generation, but I think it's so great that more people seem to want to make their own knitwear and are investing in slow fashion.
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It's wonderful to be able to choose your own materials and produce something that is tailored to your own liking and vision.
Knitwear can truly be fashionable, and I hope my story goes a little way in demonstrating that.
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