Traditions Worth Repeating

SOMETHING OLD: The Altered Bride helped Heidi Schoen adapt her mother's wedding dress for her own wedding. HERALD PHOTO BY JAYME HALBRITTER

By LAUREN BECKHAM FALCONE

    Just engaged women usually love the process of picking out a bridal gown - shopping with friends, trying on a slew of styles, and feeling, for a moment, what their wedding day will be like.
    But for others, choosing a wedding dress is as simple as going up to the attic.
    "I always knew wearing my mother's wedding dress was a possibility," said Heidi Schoen of Boston. "It's a personal thing. The past is so precious to me, and I thought it was a really nice way to incorporate the past into my wedding day."
    But it wasn't as easy as she thought.
    "The dress wasn't preserved," she said. "It was all yellowed. I brought it to the Altered Bride to have it cleaned, but the top part wasn't salvageable. so I used the bottom and had a new top made."
    Roseanna Martino, owner of the Altered Bride on Newbury Street, said it takes planning to wear an heirloom dress.
    "I suggest brides bring in the dress about two years before the wedding day, because part of my service is to figure out if the dress is going to work for them."

    Martino determines many things - if the gown can be cleaned, if the material is salvageable, and what alterations need to be made.
    "About 80 to 90 percent of the cases I need to enlarge the gown," she said. "And most of the gowns come in yellowed, with dark browns stains in them. We have a process that brings the gowns up to the original shade, but it needs to be soaked over several months. Plus if the bride isn't pleased, she needs enough time to go and find another gown."

    Cost is a factor, too. Don't wear a family heirloom to save money.
    "Sometimes it costs more to restore a gown than to buy a new one," Martino said. (At the Altered Bride, restorations cost between $500 and $1,500.)