Handmade Wedding Dress

Can we talk about wedding planning real quick here? That nonsense is a LOT of work. Especially if you happen to be the kind of person who likes to make things. Or the kind of person who procrastinates. Or, you know, both of those things.

This has been a long time coming: I'm making my wedding dress. Scratch that. I MADE my wedding dress. I never was the little girl who dreamt about her wedding and planned it all out in advance, but I had always kind of figured I would make my dress. That was cemented when Mike and I got engaged and I actually started looking at dresses. How much? For polyester?! Criminy! 

So it was decided: I would make my dress. I knew I loved lace, didn't want anything princess-y (more of a boho girl at heart), and that I wanted to be comfortable and able to dance. (And dance and dance and dance.) I even toyed with knitting it before abandoning that half-baked idea: our wedding is in June, and I hate knitting anything that's not wool. Early on, I decided that I would make separates, because it's much easier to convince yourself to make a skirt and a top than it is to make a *gown*. I've made outfits in a weekend, what's the big deal with one more skirt and top?

It's a Big. Deal.

When it's gonna be probably the most photographed outfit of your life, it's hard not to feel the pressure. When you buy the most perfect fabric for an unjustifiable amount (justification: IT WAS 20% OFF), the idea of cutting into it kind of makes ya sweat a little. When you have to make something absolutely perfectly fitted and you can't even pretzel your arms around to your back to button the darn thing up by yourself -- (Do you ask for help from a neighbor you've only seen in the hall? Do you bring it to work to fit in a bathroom stall with a friend? These are the questions.) -- well, in these cases, one might find themselves in just a mild sort of panic.

Obviously, those are the kind of moments that call for a superhero. 

'

The kind of superhero, or should I say superHUMAN, who has been teaching you how to deal for all of your life. MOM!

I'm not sure I can even quantify everything we got done the weekend she visited. We finished fitting so I could finalize the pattern. We built an arch for the ceremony. We bought trees. We planned decorations. We picked up supplies for the guestbook. We practiced embroidery techniques for the dress. She made me silk crepe bias tape (she's a saint, I tell ya). And probably biggest of all? We moved the furniture, washed the wood flooring, laid out the fabric, and cut everything out. And then I sewed 4.87 miles of french seams and told my mom she could never ever ever leave.

So that was beginning of April. Over the following month and a half, I stitched away, sewing the bodice almost entirely by hand, because it's lace, and that's what you do with lace. 

I learned that this isn't actually how you sew loops in for a button placket. I learned this after I sewed the loops in for a button placket. My loops are not all the same size and I did not for half a second even consider redoing this nonsense.

One evening I sat down to sew the buttons onto my dress. I counted and realized that I had inexplicably made 33 loops down the back - what a strange, uneven number. I had planned to use the buttons from my mom's dress, which had also been worn by her sister, and was originally her mother's gown from the 1950's. 33 is a lot of button loops, and I was struck with the thought that I probably should have counted the buttons on my mom's dress before making such an odd number of loops.

So I pulled out the dress and began to count the buttons. 25 down the back. 4 on each sleeve. No more, no less. I hadn't gotten emotional about the dress until this very moment, but I texted my mom as I started to tear up, and then went about the business of sewing 33 buttons onto my bodice, thinking of the happy days they had been buttoned up in years past.

And I also hemmed the thing by hand.

Because wedding planning, and sewing your own dress, my friends?

It is not for the faint of heart.

Realistically, I won't post again til sometime in July when we are back from our honeymoon. Stay tuned for the big reveal - our wedding is in just a few weeks!

Intarsia Triangles WIP - Part 2!

It's slow(ish) going on the intarsia sweater front. The truth is, knitting it isn't so bad, but knitting combined with all the other steps is what kills. See: making charts. Weaving in ends. Fixing mistakes (duplicate stitch embroidery, shhh). But it is SO gratifying to see a pattern come to life like this!

This is the front panel. It is going to be a hi-lo design, pretty cropped in front, with a scoop neck. I had not done a shaped hem before, so I'm pretty happy with how it turned out--but it does bother me that I didn't shape it with the ribbing on the bottom. I now have to rehang it or seam the rib band on, which just won't look as clean. Maybe in the future I'll be daring enough to try it, but I wasn't even sure how the shaping would turn out here, so I decided to play it safe. 

These aren't totally true-to-color images, at least not with the blue. It's more of a teal (Knitpicks Marine Heather, Palette wool yarn), which matches my aran sweater a bit better. It is just so darn exciting to watch this come off the needles bit by bit!

Sweater Planning: Intarsia Triangles WIP

Even though I have the tiniest bit of knitting left to do on my cabled City Tweed sweater, I started in on the next project. I couldn't resist! My next sweater is going to be similar to the intarsia sweater in my print design project, but with some different colors. 

I purchased an intarsia carriage off eBay, and the day it came I was immediately trying it out. This thing is incredible! I'm so stoked about the possibilities here! However, charting the entire sweater out on graph paper is less than ideal. Anybody know of a website where you can do this? All I could find were sites where you upload a photo and it turns it into a pattern -- and I don't have a photo to use, since it is an all-over pattern. It would be perfect if I could digitally just fill in a chart!

In the meantime, it's all about the hand drawing and coloring. I know it will be worth it once I start knitting, but for now, it's pretty tedious. Only the excitement of actually putting this on the machine is getting me through!

Cabled Sweater in City Tweed - WIP

Lately I have been doing a lot of knitting! I brought my knitting machine home for break, along with, um, over 100 balls of yarn. When Knitpicks had their Thanksgiving week sale, I splurged and bought pretty much all the yarn I will need for my senior collection. It was a huge purchase, but I am so excited to use these luxury yarns. Fiber snob and proud of it!

Here's some proof from after I opened the box. This isn't even all of it! But I just counted 99 balls in this picture alone so I guess it's close. It's just so much yarn. But I'm starting to make my way through it, believe it or not!

So this is the latest project/ I learned how to do these cute little triangles on my machine, and paired them along with a staghorn aran cable and two braided cables. Lots of counting and keeping track of my place and catching mistakes! I don't even know what I would do without my knitting machine. Maybe I'll post all about it sometime this month in case someone is interested in getting one? They are amazing tools with insane capabilities. It still takes a good amount of time to knit something like the sweater above, due to the amount of hand manipulated stitches, but it still speeds things up from hand knitting.

By the way, this is Knitpicks City Tweed yarn, in the Jacquard colorway. The photo isn't true to color, but I'll try to get some better photos in natural lighting with a real camera soon! The yarn itself is some of my favorite to work with. I used it on my last sweater, and it's just a luscious blend of merino and alpaca. The neps add so much visual interest and it's a joy to work with and to wear!