The Wedding Dress

 There's going to be a wedding.

And this is what I've been doing this week instead of posting on my blog.

Abby bought a dress that was strapless (on sale).  She wanted one with a princess neckline and sleeves.  So a week later, I have taken the dress apart and remade it with a bodice (it will also have sleeves when I am finished with it).  The lining is altered, a new longer zipper's in place, the neckline was marked for the scalloped lace and cut out and the dress is ready to be joined to the lining.

All that's left are the sleeves and the bustle tape so Abby can dance with Patrick at her wedding.

Oh wait, on second thought...there may be some hand sewn embellishments later. And possibly a long row of tiny hand -covered buttons (just for show) up the back and some hand made loops on the sides and back so the 2-inch satin sash will stay in place. And did I mention that Abby is a teeny tiny bit of a thing, around 5 feet tall, so the hem will need to be taken up but that's a piece-of-cake after remaking the dress.

I'm in the home stretch and it feels good.  It's always a bit dangerous to undertake and make such severe changes on something so expensive and important as someone else's wedding dress, even if she a really really good friend.  Even if I think of her almost as another of my daughters.  Abby was blessed when the original dress designer gifted us some of the same fabric and lace.  Wow...he's amazingly nice. There is no way I could have found fabric or lace to match.  NO WAY.  The dress would have looked homemade and altered and not good at all without the same lace and fabric.

All this has been going on while the rest of the house looks like this....5 rooms of "like this".

I stuffed towels around the sewing room door and the dress is covered in plastic while I'm not working on it. The sewing room doesn't normally look like a bomb went off in there but there is overflow right now from other rooms that are being worked on.  I managed to clear out a good portion of it so I could work.

There's not much worse than plaster dust all over the house while trying to sew a wedding dress..

It might take a few months to wipe down the whole house.  There is dust everywhere!!!!!!!  The painters assure me they will be done by the holidays.

I'm hoping they mean the Halloween holidays.