She shone in a one-of-a-kind $150 wedding dress made from her mother’s old lace coverlet

Gracie Songer never wanted a conventional salon wedding dress. The Utah tattoo artist tried on dresses to learn which cuts and fabrics suited her, but she was looking for something artistic and personal.

The answer was stored for decades in her family home. Her mother, Rebekah, had bought a white Battenberg lace coverlet in 1992, when she was 16 and working at the ZCMI department store. She originally purchased it for a “hope chest,” a traditional chest used to collect items for a future marriage and family life.

Rebekah married in 1999 and used the coverlet for a time. When it went out of fashion, she kept it instead of throwing it away. Years later, it became the central material for her daughter’s wedding dress.

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I have known my whole life that my dress would be different from everything that already exists.

The transformation began when Gracie and Rebekah were searching for a light, airy fabric. During a fitting, Gracie asked her mother to bring an ordinary sheet so she could see how the material might look. Rebekah returned from storage with the lace coverlet.

The project challenged Rebekah, who had sewn children’s Halloween costumes but had never made a couture gown. She learned through trial and error over three months, creating a structured upper section, corset and full skirt. Because cotton creases easily and does not hold its shape well, she added organza beneath the skirt to preserve the lace’s appearance. A small blue ink stain on the coverlet became Gracie’s version of the traditional “something blue.”

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When Gracie asked me to make her wedding dress, I was scared. It seemed to me that the project was beyond my abilities, but it meant so much to her that I would sew it that she gave me the courage to try.