OFW : Drafting the Wedding Dress

Hello everybody!

While I have been away I have been busy, busy, busy!!!

I sketched out 3 ideas for the gown design...

The Original

Mizrahi Spring '12 Inspired

Then a short and/or convertible version of the Original.

This will be the first pattern I have to draft and design myself, too. Every article of clothing (with very few exceptions) needs a pattern. Since this is just a sketch I will have to "block out" my dress with a generic strapless gown shape and then get crafty with a yard stick, Kraft paper, sharpies, yarn, pins and my newly-acquired pride-and-joy: my dress form!!!

Usually dress forms are around $200 and I need to set that kind of cash aside for my fabric and Muslin mock-up yardage. I had literally NO options available to me to get a dress form before Christmas to get working NAOW.

Yes, I checked craigslist. Yes, I checked teh e-bays. No dice at all there.

$75 was the best deal I could find. I'd rather invest in one that is a working dress form and is adjustable from my-size and up, instead of buying a half-solution to my problem and having another problem to deal with. I was really racking my brain until Shawn reminded me what he mentioned last year (when I was going through the would-I-have-to-make-my-dress situation): Grandpa has one in his basement. Grandma bought it before she left Earth to make dresses with and never got to use it.

HOWWWW did I forget that?!

In any case... it was there. And it's not perfectly sized but it was perfectly free. And that covers up a lot of size issues. It can still be used to pin, draft and drape! So it will work.

It is now living in my office tingling with purpose.

AHHHH! I am SO excited now! NOTHING is standing in my way! Plus I just had a huge ego-boost: I can make my dress pattern WITH MATH!

The A-Line Ballgown Skirt is really a simple cone. To find the surface area of the skirt would be as good as knowing how many yards my pattern will take to complete the skirt before it is even made. I just have to divide my computing units into meters and take care to note they are in SQUARE INCHES. Failure to take note of that could increase my cost and leftover fabric approximately enough to piss me off for a whole day. So I took note.

As I block it out I will take pictures and post the progress of each step! I'm sorry if I'm not as fast movign as I'd like to be but it is the holiday season and I DIY a lot of my gifts for people! My hands will either be crocheting, blogging or pinning!

Just keep hanging in there with me!

One Year Ago!

A year ago today I found my wedding dress. If you'd like to read the story again click the link below! It is the most-read story on the blog!

Happy 11.11.11 - Peace Day + Vet's Day

peace/pēs/

Exclamation:	Used as a greeting.
Noun:	Freedom from disturbance; quiet and tranquility.
Synonyms:	quiet - calm - tranquillity - tranquility - stillness

 

 

Peace is most defined AS a lack of hostility. I do not believe this wholly; Peace IS a capacity to hold conflicting ideas about how people live and to accept each of those ideas as equally good to the others so long as it does not disturb your own life. Without this, Peace cannot be achieved.

I am highly, highly spiritual and have no exclusive religious beliefs belonging to any one religion but I have studied Christian theology at Creighton University in Omaha, NE and I learned something about good and evil. Good is not a lack of evil; evil is a lack of good. Everything is inherently good. And if it Is, it is meant to Be.
I believe we are all connected and all thoughts come to us from whatever or whoever God is. To have the peace of God, you must acknowledge the connections between us and revel in the differences among us.

Most humans haven't discovered that there is NO way to completely agree with everyone, which I find silly. Nothing is for Everyone. Of course you won't agree with what everyone has to say; not everyone agrees with you. However, we are all human and any thoughts conflicting or otherwise, join us together.

Feel the oneness you have within yourself, then to the person closest to you. Think about how you may disagree with them on something, but how you still love them very much. Extend that love for yourself and those close to you to any others in our one race of Human and you will find Peace.

Peace is not a lack of anything; it merely Is.

Being Married : Don't Fight Over Money

Finances and marriage.

The two go together like a horse and carriage. LOL... sorry.

But seriously, money is something you'll have to work into marriage. There is no one-solution-fits-all because every person is different, thus every marriage is different. The one thing that is universal to successful dealings with money in marriage is honesty. Funny, this could be the key to everything in marriage being more successful, but we're focusing on the dolla's today.

Shawn and I do not fight about money. We just refuse. To us it is simply not a good enough reason to get upset enough to fight over. Besides, do you know what the deal is with our money and the central bank?

We follow the simple rules:
-Live simply, below our means.
We don't go out every week. Or every weekend. It helps that we are homebodies and we hate most modern cinema, but this helps A LOT.
-Save every dime not used for regular expenses.
 Extra money will be pooled for DVD’s, yarn, extra grocery (like donuts, burritos or snacky crap), pet accessories, and home furninshings.
-Be open and honest about how much money you have and do not have.
I about crawled into the floor admitting to my husband how much money I do not have to help with the new TV. It made me feel worthless, which is ridiculous, but he wasn't mad. He was happy to know how much to set aside for the next few months instead of being surprised at my sudden confession upon receiving a bill when it would be too late.

-Budget, budget, budget.
Even if you don’t mix your funds you MUST mix your budget. Like above, you have to be open with how much money you do and do not have for things (we have been together for 4 years before we were married and have not merged funds. We probably won’t for a while. It’s working for us).
-Remember that money is just money.
It is made and spent everyday. It is simply paper and the only stresses it can give you are the ones you give yourself over it. Sure things are easier with more of it, duh, but fighting about that won't give you more of it.

Do you and your partner have tips that help your financial sharing stay happy and shiny? SHARE!!!

Oh, and if you missed the surprise from yesterday, here's that too!

SURPRISE!!!

For those who do not recognize... this logo is for the new Guns N' Roses.

And we totally saw them last night at ye Olde Qwest Centre (now known as century something...)!!!

I won tickets at my amazing job and that's not all... they were SUITE BOX TICKETS. This was the surprise I was keeping to myself yesterday!!!

I didn't tell Shawn we were going until we drove past the marquee at aforementioned Centre and he saw the logo with the advertised show.

"We're going to this?!" he asked.

"YUUUP," I was finally allowed to be excited now that he knew!!!

Better still, Reverend Horton Heat opened and played for over an hour!!! If you have played guitar hero you've probably heard "Psychobilly Freakout."

 That was better for Shawn than the headliner, who if you don't know, only has Axl as the remaining original bandmember. It was a great show, we had a FABULOUS time for free and didn't mind the late-starting show one bit. We did leave 4 songs from the end after November Rain but apparently from the reviews today in the Omaha World Herald a lot more people missed a lot more songs. It was after 1 when the concert finally ended.

My least favorite thing, to be a negative Nancy (no offense to Nancies out there; y'all can make fun of my B- blood type if you want) but they have replaced Slash with a baby poseur version of himself. The boy needs to take that hat off his head, cigarette out of his mouth and practice not playing sour notes here and there because he's too focused on the camera and babes in front of him to pay attention to the neck of his guitar. DURRRR.

Axl sang pretty well despite some falsely harsh reviews and he bopped around doing a classic 1-leg hoedown jig from time to time. It was a show filled with some talented musicians for sure.