A bride cut her mom's '80s wedding dress into a new outfit for her own wedding

• Devon Lambur altered her mother's wedding dress into a top and pants for her wedding welcome dinner.
• She told Business Insider it took around $1,000 and eight months to make the outfit.
• Eliza, the seamstress, had only one chance to cut the dress correctly.

Devon Lambur was set on incorporating her mother's wedding dress from 1984 into her own wedding after it was given to her just hours after her proposal in North Carolina, she told Business Insider.

Devon, a dietitian and personal trainer, said she met her husband, Dylan Lambur, a development manager, at her boss' birthday party in February 2018.

The couple live in St. Louis, Missouri, where their wedding was held on October 6.

The dress was transported from Pennsylvania to the Outer Banks, North Carolina, by Devon's mother, who knew the couple was getting engaged on their vacation in June last year, Devon said.

She added that before this point, she had never asked or thought about wearing the dress.

A TikTok Devon posted on October 12, with over 550,000 views as of Friday, showed the final outfit she altered the dress into.

Devon told BI that though it was a beautiful dress, she originally didn't envision wearing it but did want to incorporate it into the wedding celebrations in some way.

Rather than a traditional rehearsal dinner with only the wedding party in attendance, they hosted a welcome dinner with 100 guests, where Devon wore her reworked outfit.

Devon said she had seen a high-neck outfit similar to the one she ended up creating and decided to use this as inspiration. Eliza, a seamstress at Cozynest Custom Apparel & Alterations in St. Louis, was tasked with making the outfit.

Good things take time

Though it wasn't dissimilar to the original gown, the outfit cost around $1,000 and took eight months to create, Devon told BI.

She spent around 30 hours on trips to the alterations specialist and initially didn't realize how much work it would be, she added. The outfit took this long to create because Eliza had only one chance to cut the dress, and there would be no going back.

"She had to mock up pants, then she did a second mock-up," Devon told BI.

Only once the design and fit were correct on the mock-up pants could Eliza judge how to cut the dress to maximize the area of material to work with, Devon said.

She was initially nervous to tell her mother she intended to cut up the gown and was surprised she was cool with the idea. Devon added that she decided to include her mother in the process, rather than making it a surprise because it was her dress, too.

"I would FaceTime her at almost every single one of the fittings. That was a special experience for us," Devon told BI.

The outfit wasn't the only surprise for guests

In another TikTok Devon posted on October 9, which has 2.7 million views as of Friday, she surprised her husband and guests with a pre-entrance message played over the speakers in their wedding venue. In the audio clip, she expressed how excited she was to be getting married to Dylan.

Devon told BI that Dylan was hell-bent on not crying at the wedding. "I had a lot of time to get creative with things, and I was like, 'How can I make him cry?'" she said.

She told BI that prior to the ceremony, she would practice her vows with the voice memo app, which gave her the idea to surprise Dylan and the other guests. The only person aware of this surprise was her dad.

In the heartwarming TikTok, not only is Dylan seen in tears, but so is his best man.

Devon's advice for future brides is to make it as sentimental and personal as possible.

"Wedding stuff can get really overwhelming, especially when you're working a full-time job or two jobs; it gets super crazy," she said.

Devon told BI: "This makes it all worth it in the end."