After 200 hours of painstaking restoration, a valuable Bermudian heirloom wedding dress is now on display at the Bermuda National Trust (BNT) Verdmont Museum.

The dress was repaired by American stitch expert and teacher, Sally Criswell who was in Bermuda in March with stitch workshop partner Susan Greening Davis.

Mrs. Criswell and Ms Davis were in Bermuda last year, teaching workshops for the Bermuda Guild of Stitchery when they were approached by Dr. Brenda Davidson wife of Hugh Davidson, chair of the BNT museums committee and past president.

“Susan and I were just sitting outside,” Mrs. Criswell told The Royal Gazette. “Brenda said, ‘I have something to show you’. She came over with some material all wadded up in a bag.”

Ms Davis said she and Mrs. Criswell knew they’d found something special as soon as Dr. Davidson unballed the material.

“When Dr. Davidson showed us, we were so excited,” said Ms Davis. “We recognised what it was. When Sally investigated it, the age of it was unbelievable.”

Mr. Davidson salvaged it from the Bermuda National Trust’s annual jumble sale two years ago. The Davidsons got Mrs. Criswell special papers to take the dress out of the country, to work on it, and return it to Bermuda. Back at home in Florida, Mrs. Criswell runs a business helping people to restore and display their family memorabilia, such as photographs, a pair of baby booties or grandmother’s handstitched gloves.

Mrs. Criswell also travels the world with Ms Davis, teaching stitching and crafting workshops and leading retreats. Ms Davis, herself is very well known in the sewing world. As a needlework designer her work has been seen on Home & Garden television and in countless stitching magazines.

“We believe very much that this wedding dress was originally made in Bermuda in the 1850s,” said Mrs Criswell. “It is a 19th century wedding dress. Although, the top half was made at a different time than the bottom.”

The dressmaker, probably someone’s mother, grandmother or aunt, used a number of fancy stitch techniques including broderie anglaise or white work, reticello, French hand sewing and Irish crochet on 80 count Irish linen. Count refers to the number of stitches that are packed into an inch of fabric.

“The original dressmaker probably worked on this for about three or four years,” said Mrs. Criswell. “She may have started working on it when the girl was born.

“This happened in my family. When my mother was born in 1916, her grandmother sent her mother the lace to make her wedding dress. So my grandmother started making this dress, and my mother wore it when she was 18 years old and got married.”

The maker of the Bermuda wedding dress worked on the dress so long that Mrs Criswell could see her technique evolve and improve on different parts of the dress.

“We don’t think the dress was done by a professional,” said Ms Davis. “Professionals would each take a different part of the dress.

“One would only do eyelets, and another person would only do roses etc. You would be able to look at the piece and you would know from the different tensions in the thread, that different people worked on it. This one is all done by the same person’s hand.”

However, Mrs. Criswell said the dressmaker would have been an “exquisite embroider”.

“She was very, very good,” Mrs. Criswell said. “You can tell in some places in the dress where she might have had a little stress in her life, because the stitches are a little tighter. She improved as she went along. Some days she daydreamed because sometimes the French knots have two wraps of thread and in others they have three wraps. In some of them she was daydreaming a lot because she dragged her thread from French knot to French knot, rather than cutting the thread after every knot.”

When Mrs. Criswell received it, the dress was in very poor condition, and it was understandable that someone either didn’t know what they were giving away, or felt overwhelmed by the amount of work needed to restore it.

“Someone had the dress and dumped it off,” said Ms Davis. “An everyday person would think ‘I could never fix this’. There were so many tears and rips in it. However, they did drop it off, so they must have known they had something. We’d like to know who gave it to us so we could share what we know about it.”

“There is major disintegration of the linen fabric,” said Mrs Criswell. “The dress originally would have been white, but when we got it it was dark beige colour. I washed it about seven times, and spent about 200 hours repairing it, hand stitching and fixing all the little holes in it.”

To get rid of the brown stain on the dress, she washed it seven times with a special formula that included lemon juice.

“You just leave it in there to soak, and the dirt rises to the surface,” said Mrs. Criswell. “The dress would not have withstood ordinary washing. A lot of the pleats were coming undone, and I have handstitched them down again.”

The dress has specially embroidered roses on them. Mrs. Criswell is known to be a fast stitcher, and one rose took her half an hour to complete, so the roses on the dress would have been quite a lot of work for the original dressmaker. There was a piece of Velcro stitched on the back that indicated the dress had been worn by someone quite recently. Under the Velcro, Mrs. Criswell found rows of tiny mother-of-pearl buttons, that would have taken a long time to do-up.

Mrs. Criswell left some of the stitching on the back of the dress unrepaired, because it revealed how the stitches and linen were made.

“It is very historical to look at it and see how the linen is ageing,” she said. “On the back of the skirt are hook and eye closures. They have rusted I have cleaned them up, but they will continue to rust. They are mentioned in Shakespeare in Henry V, and even Charles Dickens mentioned them. They are among some of the first closures. They were before buttons.”

During the last year, Mrs. Criswell and Ms Davis took the dress with them as they travelled around the United States conducting stitching workshops.

“The women just loved it,” said Mrs. Criswell. “They were drooling over it. It is a breathtaking piece of history.”

The dress has been viewed, in various states of repair, by women in at least four states, and many towns. It has probably seen far more of the world than its original wearer, who is unknown.

“The bride was probably from a well-off family, because this kind of linen would have been quite expensive,” said Ms Davis, “but not necessarily. They could have traded for it. The embroidery could have been done by women of any economic class.”

“The Bermuda National Trust are so very fortunate to have it,” said Ms Davis. “Anything over 50 years is vintage or an antique, and this is a 19th century wedding dress.”

Similar wedding dresses have sold for thousands of dollars at auction or on ebay.

Mrs. Criswell’s time on the dress was entirely donated. To thank her, the BNT recently made Mrs. Criswell a lifetime member.

“The Bermuda National Trust is exceptionally grateful for the many hours of work that Mrs. Criswell donated to us through restoring the wedding dress; she has brought a true treasure back to life that can once again be enjoyed by Bermuda and our visitors,” said Laura Lyons, Museums Collections Manager.

“The dress is currently on display at Verdmont Museum in Smith’s Parish (Opening Hours: Tuesdays to Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) and we encourage anyone interested to pop by and see the dress — it is a beautiful work of art.”

The Bermuda National Trust would like to hear from anyone who knows something about the original owners of the wedding dress and its history.