Here 'crumbs' the bride, all dress in… bread tags?

Will Wapling and Stephanie Watson on their wedding day. Stephanie, a Victorian fashion designer, created her wedding dress from 10,000 bread tags

Victorian bride Stephanie Watson has been saving for her wedding dress for 10 years. Saving old plastic bread tags, that is.

The 29-year-old fashion designer from Trentham, in Victoria’s North-West, turned her decade-old collection of 10,000 bread tags into a wedding dress when she married high-school sweetheart Will Wapling last month.

Stephanie started collecting the plastic best-before bread tags when the couple were in their teens and Will joked that when she had enough to make a wedding dress, they would wed.

So, Stephanie continued to collect the tiny tags.

“We started living together in Geelong and there was a pile of bread tags on the window sill which we just kept adding to,” Stephanie told The Geelong Advertiser. “It was just a joke at the beginning, but then people heard about the idea and they started collecting for us

“I was getting so many, I had to keep getting bigger and bigger jars,” she adds. “Then, 10 years later, I thought surely we’ve got enough for a wedding dress now.”

Unfortunately, despite having thousands of tags, nearly a decade on she still didn’t have enough to fashion a wedding dress. That is until Will’s cousin, a baker, donated an entire rolls of bread tags.

Stephanie could finally put her design and sewing skills to use on her own wedding gown and, having spent more than 300 hours trying to figure out how to turn 10,000 plastic tags of all colours into a creation that didn’t look awful, she finally came up with a design that suited.

“The main thing in the designing of the dress was that I didn’t want people to be able to tell the tags were stitched on. I wanted them all overlapping, so you couldn’t see the stitching,”

The final result was a seven kilo dress containing around 10,000 bread tags collected over a decade. And the final cost? About $36. Of course, you can’t put a price on the dress or love and imagination that went into making it so, to Stephanie and Will, it is absolutely priceless.

“I just didn’t want to have a normal bridal gown,” the bride told The Geelong Advertiser’s Mandy Squires.

“There are so many occasions where you can wear a beautiful feminine dress in your life. For a really special day I thought, why not have something completely outlandish?”