it yet.
Then, one sunny January morning, Joleen and her family appeared in the shop again. It was as if nothing unusual had happened at all. There was very little explanation as to where she had been but that’s sometimes how these things go so I just went along with it.
‘It’s all changed, Thelma,’ she told me with a smile.
‘Oh right, has it now?’ I replied. ‘I suppose you want something really fancy this time’ was what I wanted to say but I bit my tongue instead.
‘I’ve seen the new Disney,’ she explained, ‘and now I want a Princess and the Frog theme.’
‘OK,’ I replied. ‘We can do that – of course we can, love. Let’s get Leanne and her sketchpad, shall we?’
‘Is that OK, Thelma? Is it really?’ she excitedly asked.
‘It’s fine, it’s up to you,’ I replied. ‘You can have it if you want.’
It really wasn’t a big deal for us – we are used to dealing with a bit of change and I know things are often unpredictable, so I took a deep breath: it was going to be a long day. They had brought a lot of children with them, who looked as if they had plenty of noisy toys that they were looking forward to playing with. At this point Joleen pulled a whole load of colouring books out of her bag and started to show me pictures of the Disney images that she wanted her dress to look like. There were stickers on one side of the page and line drawings ready to be coloured in on the other; key images had been printed off the Internet and stuck around the pages of the colouring book too.
I couldn’t have been more right about that day being long. They talked and talked, going over the new plans again and again. In fact, the young kids made so much noise and distraction that not long after that visit we began to tell people that they couldn’t bring small children with them as we don’t insure for them to be in there with the machines whirring and bolts of fabric everywhere. It just started to make me uneasy, the number of kids we’d sometimes have running about – I didn’t want anyone hurting themselves because I hadn’t spoken up.
Now the wedding dress had changed from pink to white. The skirts and the shape of the dress had changed too – very Princess and the Frog. And different types of diamanté were being brought up. It was all getting a bit out of hand. I got the feeling that the girl needed a few firm boundaries if colours and dates were starting to change this much.
‘Listen, love,’ I said. ‘All of this is fine, but you’ve not paid anything beyond the deposit yet and there’s a lot of change happening here.’
I looked at her mum. ‘You’re going to have to reassure me that these really are the plans now. We’re not going to be able to actually start making this dress until you pay a bit more of the fee.’
‘No problem,’ said the mum, straight away. She seemed very relaxed about everything – in some ways, a little bit too relaxed.
She was an absolutely beautiful woman – she could have been a model, she was so statuesque – and she had a real natural beauty. But she did not seem especially bothered by her role as a mum. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen such a set-up but this particular mum was almost slightly off-hand about the kids, leaving it largely to Joleen to keep an eye on them. It was as if she’d done her years of hard graft, she still looked good and she wanted to enjoy herself and her moment of looking fabulous as the mother-of-the-bride.
You’ve got to remember these women are not ‘mothers-of-the-bride’ in the traditional way that we would recognise them – they are women in their mid-thirties, who have married and had kids very young. They’ve put in a couple of decades of hard graft and now they’re sitting back for the party season.
While we sat there in the factory, Joleen was running round keeping an eye on the kids while Mrs Quinn worked through a selection of no fewer than four potential mother-of-the-bride dresses with me. Initially she had planned something very Spanish, with an almost entirely see-through corset to match Joleen’s original Latin theme. That dress would have been very elaborate and highly coloured in parts. Then there was talk – for some time – of an ivory dress. It seemed she had a kind of tribute bridal dress in mind. I raised my eyebrows, a little, but went with it. After this there were more changes and then she struck on her final idea.
At the time there were a couple of magazines in the factory that one of the girls had been flicking through during her lunch break. In one of them there was an article featuring a selection of celebrity wedding dresses, including Cheryl Cole’s gown from her wedding to Ashley. Straight away, this particular dress caught Mrs Quinn’s eye.
‘Ooh, now I’d love something like that!’ she exclaimed.
‘OK,’ I replied.
‘It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? And she’s such a stunner!’
‘Yeah, it’s a great dress,’ I agreed. I had always liked that dress – it was glamorous without being too flamboyant.
‘Which bit of the dress do you think you’d like to be the inspiration?’ I asked, wondering if it would be the fitted skirt, the wide train at the back, the way that the skirt kicked out at the bottom or the strapless corseted bodice with trails of sequins working their way down from the waist across the fabric.
‘The dress,’ she said.
‘I’m not sure what you mean, love.’
‘I’d like my dress to look like that one,’ she said, her face totally deadpan.
‘What – the whole dress? You just want a copy?’
‘Yes please, love.’
And sure enough, she did. She wasn’t interested in being inspired by the new Mrs Cole, she wanted an actual replica. I’m not sure how I would have felt if my mum had turned up on my big day dressed as one of the most famous pop stars in the country, but things are different in the traveller community, and this mum was determined to look her absolute best. And there seemed no lack of love between the two of them. We promised to do as good a version as we could for Mrs Quinn before turning our attention back to Joleen, who had been happily minding the kids for all of this time.
By the end of that day, plans for the new version of the wedding dress were shaping up to be spectacular. It was to have more diamanté on it than any other dress I had done at that stage. There was a lily pad 3D flower – sitting just off her hip, where the corset met the skirt – to further reflect the ‘Princess and the Frog’ theme, and then there were curling leaves coming down the skirt from the waist. Initially these leaves were to be edged in diamonds but soon plans were in place for them to be entirely filled in with crystals. The flowers were to be 3D, as were the tendrils flowing down her body, so that they were filled out and curling in different directions, standing out from the bodice and skirt. The colours were now white and silver, with huge diamanté sections. Sparkles would be provided by the Swarovski ‘Aurora borealis’ – the most expensive type of gem we use. These special crystals display different colours depending on the light and the way you look at them. They have to be ordered from Swarovski or a Swarovski agent.
It was going to be a real statement wedding. But then came the biggest statement of all …
‘And then for the Frog Prince outfit—’ Joleen began.
‘OK,’ I said, wondering where on earth this was going. Could I even make a ‘Frog Prince’ suit?
‘I’d like my fiancé in it,’ she said.
I nodded slowly, desperate to take her seriously but equally sure that no traveller man would ever go along with this. There’s no way I’m even going to cut out the fabric for this idea, I thought to myself.
‘He’s a big fat ugly thing,’ interjected the mum. ‘A suit like that would be wasted on him!’
It was hard not to laugh.
‘But he’s