Wow. People read my blog

There are people following my blog! People besides Jenny! This is very novel for me.

So I felt that the main thing I should do is give some info on the dress vision. So scroll down read the "Inspirations" post. It wasn't up yesterday, but I fought with the scanner, Photoshop and Blogger for awhile and now it is. Hopefully that'll clarify things as many people justifiably said that they couldn't picture the dress.

Second, we've done more talking about wedding dates and it could go as late as May or June now. That decision will be made in about a month when we visit our sites down in Baltimore.

Third and by far the biggest thing is the fact that it has been implied and in some cases stated quite clearly that I am a) delusional, b) misguided, c) in need of a realistic talking to or failing that, a slap in the face (Jenny, presumably you are supposed to administer the slap) or that d) I am flat out insane.

To which I say: Maybe.

But I will say first and foremost that I am so onboard with my own insanity here. Every dress I've worn to every semi-formal occasion since I was 15 years old has been homemade. First by my mom and later by me. My taste has always been a bit off and I come from a very crafty line of women. Am I saying that I won't be crying, swearing and/or throwing the cat? No I am not. I'm just saying that I've cried, sworn and thrown the cat before. We're all used to it here.

Witness the ensembles that I wore to the weddings I attended last year:
Winter wedding - Homemade velvet dress, handknitted shrug.

Destination wedding - homemade sundress, knitted shawl (this dress, oddly caused the most crying and cat throwing)
















Future bro & sis in law's wedding - homemade dress - love this one! Inspired by a Barbie doll. Made a little drawstring purse to match and everyone was amazed that I made my purse. I was like "I'm wearing a boned corset! I hemmed ruffles for 10-20 hours! And you're commenting on a purse I made in 20 minutes!" Gracious as always, I kept that though to myself. Also, this is perhaps, the worst picture ever taken of Justin & I, but it shows off the outfit really well, so c'est la vie.


Handknitted shrug - my cousin's wedding - she requested we all wear red and I already had this awesome red dress. (There's my mom with us in the pic - Hi Mom!)



And a final wedding, to which the only handmade thing I wore was a necklace made by my Nana. And I tried to make a sweater and to remake a dress I'd made years ago. Neither worked. I ditched both and it turned out to be such a warm November day that I never could have worn the sweater even if it had turned out.

That being said I have a few safety mechanisms in mind. First off - the sewn portion of the dress will be a perfectly fine wedding dress all on its own. If something horrible happens to the knitting, I will not be nekkid on the wedding day. Or beating down the door of David's Bridal. While I'm relatively new to knitting, I've been sewing since I was 6 years old. That's 25 years of sewing (crap! 25 years???) so I feel pretty confident about that. The plan is to start knitting, then make the fabric dress, then continue knitting and attach the knitting to the dress. The knit parts will be the overskirt and the cap sleeves.

I started another swatch on MUCH bigger needles as I was sitting here watching the blogger progress bar spin on my pics and that had me thinking about Kay's awesome laceweight. It is some cool stuff and the possibility of having a green fabric dress with ivory knitted lace is very tempting. Not the least of which reason is b/c I'm lazy and if I wanted to do some dyeing I'd have to do it on our back fire escape. I'll spare you the visual, it probably wouldn't be pretty. But although I can envision a green dress with ivory, and it's a very nice vision, has a green sash and everything, it's not my wedding dress.

It's not the vision that I had that prompted me to take off on this crazy project. And when you're used to sewing and going totally off the reservation like I am, and when you have less than stellar skills with a pencil (again, read the Inspirations post), that mental vision is the most important thing. Remember those pictures above of my that I wore to the future bro & sis in law's wedding? It started as these two patterns.


My mother asked me: do you ever just make a pattern as it was intended?
Um. No.

Justin & I had this conversation last night:
Me: Honey, Jenny's friend posted about the dress on her blog yesterday and now apparently a lot of people on the internet think I'm insane
Justin: Huh. (pause) Well you know they're kind of right.

But really - I did all that work to look good at other peoples' weddings? How can I not work at least as hard to look good at mine?