Something old, something new…

One last wedding-related craft post! It’s probably no secret by now that I’m somewhat of a geek. I definitely lean more towards fantasy than sci-fi, for the most part, and am a little sad that I haven’t found a way to incorporate something Lord of the Rings-ish into my wedding. (Though my fiance did comment when we were picking out wedding bands that the one he picked out looked kind of dwarven to him…he was a much bigger fan of the Hobbit movie than LotR.) However, I do very much enjoy Doctor Who on the sci-fi end of things, and am super-excited that Tempest is hosting a Whovian sew-along for the 50th anniversary later this year! But I’m getting a little bit of a head-start…

Two out of my three bridesmaids, as well as my mom, are also fans. I quite successfully managed to get my fiance interested.  And after this scene from a couple of seasons ago, how could I not include something Who in the wedding?

(Not the best quality vid, but it was the only one I could find that would actually play for me and wasn’t a fan-made music video. Sorry.)

I was originally just planning on having a little fun with my tiny TARDIS and phone camera at the reception, since it seemed appropriate.(My maid of honor and I have been having fun over the last few months with taking Instagram photos of a little plastic TARDIS in random places, so you bet that’s going to be going with me on my upcoming trip!) But when my mom noticed that I’d pinned some painted TARDIS shoes onto my “Crafty Geekery” Pinterest board, she suggested that we get some shoes and paint them for the reception! She originally said for myself, my sis-in-law and her, but I pointed out that my maid of honor would want them, too. So with a little help from Sis and a lot of help from Mom, we ended up painting 4 pairs of these!

(Wow, my carpet looks awful–in my defense, I’ve been busy packing and planning a wedding!)

This is basically the gist of them–SIL’s look a little different because when we told her we were doing this, she really wanted shoes without laces, so she has some slip-on canvas ones. We couldn’t find them in any other sizes (especially not mine), so the other 3 pairs are the standard lace-up Keds. The fun shoelaces were our addition, and my mom, my maid of honor, and I all now have different pairs of laces to go with.

As for my non-Whovian bridesmaid…I didn’t want her to feel left out. Like I said, she doesn’t really watch Doctor Who, but she’s been a huge  Star Wars fan for as long as I’ve known her, which is since we were kids. Her favorite character is Yoda, but I wasn’t really sure how to translate that to shoes (I always sucked the most at faces and figures in art class), and we wanted to do something where I could use the same paint we already bought for the TARDIS shoes.

So she gets R2-D2! Hmm… I wonder how it would look if I used my seam-ripper to get those Keds tags off of the tongues?

late night musings

I’m in the process of going through my clothes. The plan is to try to figure out all of my outfits for the days leading up to the wedding (and the honeymoon, of course!) within the next couple of days so I can just pack up and move the rest of my wardrobe and be done with it. One of the things I have going on within the next 2 1/2 weeks is another wedding, since we have some friends from church who are getting married a week before us. I’d been planning on wearing my Dahlia dress, but I may have to rethink that, because….
…look what I found on the back when I pulled it out from the under-the-bed storage! I have no idea what this random brown line is, how it got there, or how long it’s been there. All I know is that my initial attempt to scrub it out with soap and water failed.

This led me to examine the dress further. Which was probably a mistake, because the more I look at the top of this in particular, the less happy I am with several aspects of the finishing on this thing. The lining wants to curl to the outside of the bodice, the width of the top of the bodice is wider than the lower edge of the strap, the lining is all puckered because I think I was struggling with learning how to deal with the thread tension on my serger–I’d only had it for a few months at this point. Plus the top of the zipper is a hot mess. In short, there’s several things about it that just look very homemade in the bad way. (I will not call it a certain phrase that Project Runway popularized, because on behalf of all other Beckys in the world that sew, I hereby proclaim that this particular phrase needs to be tossed back into the fiery chasm from whence it came!)

Even if I can’t get this stain out, I think I can salvage this, because guess what–I still have an entire yard of this fabric left! I’d been tossing around the idea of a Sorbetto, but I could quite happily go for using it to remake the top of this dress and see if I can get it better the second time around. I still like the style, but surely with 5 more years of sewing experience, I can improve on those details, right? Or I could just try to get the stain mostly out and at least add a hook and eye to the back to see if that improves the zipper…

I still need to figure out what to wear to that wedding. Maybe my Lonsdale from last summer?

Sans accessories and required garden center work clothes that I’ve already worn this week and therefore need to be washed, I do have outfits picked out for 10 of the next 17 days. Including the rehearsal dinner–another previous me-made, in case you want to know–and the bachelorette party, and a button-down reserved for wearing over my wedding dress while my hair and makeup gets done. (I tested it before, and I didn’t extend the zipper enough to pull it on over my hips. Drat.) Not bad for a night’s work. Now I just need to get half the contents of my closet off of my bed so I can, you know, attempt to sleep tonight.

Another batch of wedding crafts

What I’ve been up to lately:
#1: That tie I’ve mentioned a couple of times. I’m going to be honest and say that I’m not 100% happy with the way it turned out–the poly satin didn’t press well at all, and the interfacing made it just too stiff overall. If I was going to go back and do it over again with this fabric, I’d just leave the interfacing out entirely! I also had trouble getting the much lighter lining fabric to lie flat in the tie. But after all of that drama involved in finding solid emerald green fabric in the first place, I didn’t have too many options. I’m fully expecting he’ll never wear it again after the wedding day, but I guess I can chalk this up to a learning experience.

Incidentally, this is also a sneak peek of the shirt I recently finished–I just haven’t had a chance to take a decent outfit photo of it yet, but since I’m planning on taking it on the honeymoon, I’ll see if I can get a shot or two of it there!

#2: This one’s been a few months in the making. These are the table numbers for the reception, with some cheery paper sunflowers glued to one corner of each side. I can’t take full credit for this, as I had help from my mom, my maid of honor, and even my fiance! The punches were ridiculously hard to push through the paper, so he punched every single petal of these out for me. I definitely found a keeper!

I zoomed in and lightened it up so you could see a little more detail on these. I was amazed at how realistic they look! And it was a lot of work, but these are so much lighter than silk flowers, so I think the effect is well worth it.

To give credit where it’s due, I got the idea from the punch manufacturer–found these while searching for sunflower wedding picture ideas early in the process. I have several of these leftover, and they’ll be used to decorate various baskets for bubbles and our guest “book”. (Which is actually quilt squares that my mom is going to sew together for us.)

#3: The centerpieces are finally done! My incredibly awesome maid of honor gets serious props for helping me with both steps of this–we painted all of the flowerpots, and she helped me assemble them this past Saturday while we and my fiance watched the season finale for Doctor Who.  We ended up painting several more pots than we needed to, because I didn’t know until after we did it that some of the tables at the reception place could seat up to 12–I’d been under the impression that all of the tables would seat up to 8 people, and was planning for about 18 centerpieces. My math must have been off somewhere, though, because if I’d had to make that many, I wouldn’t have had enough sunflowers!

Here’s a better view of the pots–we decided partway through that it reminds us of the 1-up mushrooms from all of the Mario Nintendo games, so I can’t help thinking of that now! I’m going to recycle a good bit of this after the wedding–I plan to make a wreath for the kitchen with the flowers (also doing sunflowers in there), and I have some herbs to plant in the pots. I just need to figure out what to do with a bunch of white candles!

This isn’t the last of it, I still have a few more crafts to do, and less than 3 weeks to finish them in! So I guess I’d better get back to work!

Playing along

I think that the thing I missed the most while working on The One Dress was the more social aspect of sewing blogging–namely, the sewalongs and challenges. So now that it’s over, even though things are a bit crazy right now, I’m happy to be able to do what I can to get back into that!

I recently learned about this through Kat and Tempest, and the timing is actually quite perfect for me! I’m not so much “spring cleaning” as packing, organizing, and setting up in the first place, but my fiance and I have made quite a bit of progress on the room lately, including several hours yesterday afternoon spent working on it. (He really deserves much of the credit, since he’s way better at organizing than I am and did quite a bit of the work of folding my fabrics and putting things away for me while I haven’t been there!) Anyway, I’m excited to follow along with this one and get some more ideas–hopefully it will be all set up and ready to go when I come back from the honeymoon.

Secondly, while I’m not doing Me-Made-May ’13 (and have already stated my reasons–I had a few very supportive responses to that, so thank you!), I have found that I’m reaching for my me-mades more often than not anyway. So I guess I’m following along in spirit. With that thought, I did try something new with an old dress today, so I do have one outfit photo to show.

I’m not sure if I ever blogged this dress, because it predates the blog. I made this to wear to my college graduation. (Here’s a scary thought–this May marks a decade since I finished my undergrad degree!) And while this dress has held up well over the years, I’m thinking that it’s time to retire this one–the fabric is starting to fade unattractively in places, particularly the line that’s forming over where I hand-stitched the hem, and I do need to downsize my wardrobe where I can. So even though it’s hard to let go of things that I’ve made, I’d like to think that maybe another teenage or college girl will find it in a local thrift shop and it will be the perfect thing to wear to kick off a new stage of life for her. Or just have some fun this summer. For the record, the pattern is Simplicity 7072, and I recall it fitting very well out of the envelope, so I may have to revisit this someday.

Now here’s how I wore it today for church (complete with German Shepherd puppy photobomb!) My original plan was to wear my “Christmas in July” dress with the thrifted green jacket that I replaced the buttons on. (Incidentally, I wore that same jacket yesterday, along with my me-made jeans and a favorite tee. Must make more jeans.) But when I put the dress on this morning, I discovered that the straps have gotten stretched out, and this dress is basically unwearable until I shorten them again. So into the mending pile it goes, and back to the closet I went. It was a bit chilly this morning, so I opted to do the dress-as-skirt look, with this 3/4-sleeved top I got for free from one of my friends who likes to pass her unwanted clothes on to me to do whatever I want with. I think the concept is good, though the outfit would be a little more successful if this dress had a lower neckline. But, as I said, this is pretty much the send-off for this dress anyway. 

That’s pretty much all I have to report for now. I did finish Doug’s tie, though I have yet to take pics of it. And I did make some more progress on a top I’m sewing for the honeymoon wardrobe. and am one decent sewing session away from finishing. Then I need to make the headbands for the bridesmaids. And finish the table numbers. And the reception centerpieces. And packing to move. And all that other stuff. 34 days to go. Ooh boy.