The Wedding Dress

I am working on a sewing project right now that has been a fabulous distraction for the madness and a pacifier for the hypomania when it occurs. My friend Beth whose blog you can find HERE, and her family have commissioned me to do a very very special and scared project for them. Her grandparents 50th wedding anniversary is at the end of the month. They asked me to take the tiny tattered 50 year old wedding dress and stitch a keepsake for them. They're Grandma was actually going to throw it away!! She found it cleaning out her closet and decided to pitch it...thankfully one of the daughters snagged it from her!!!

It started out as just a simple piece that would be framed, but you know me....grandiose they say right?...Once I started cutting into this fragile piece of material, which felt horrible at first, like I was cutting into a living thing...who cuts up a beautiful old wedding dress?!, I decided that I can't let any of the material go to waste. Not one piece. Sooooooo I decided that I would make small little pillows for all of the daughters and granddaughters, with a small ivory ribbon attached at the top so they could hang them from a peg shelf or a door knob if they wanted. I thought how wonderful it would be for all of these women to have a piece of this dress that symbolized the union that created all of them.

Of course I can't ever do anything simple....it is imperitive that my creations be something that nobody has ever seen and something with a "WOW" factor. (you'd think maybe we would have caught onto some of this BPD stuff a long time ago LOL!) Sooooo anyway....I have all the material accounted for, every piece will be used in some fashion or another....except....this thin gauze like material that was used as a lining in the collar (picture a sailor suit kind of collar)...it is yellowed and fragile and there is no way it would make it through a sewing machine. So I got into my best Pooh Bear pose "think think think...." I was not going to throw one piece of this dress away...... and then the light bulb went off!! ROSES!!! I could cut scraps and roll them into roses and used them to adorn the pillows for the daughters and granddaughters. I figured the process would be very similar to making flowers with icing, when I am making cakes....so I tried and tried and finally got the hang of it and now there are piles of this dingy, yellowed, fragile little roses ready to be adorned onto the pillows. I was so proud of myself last night I could just bust!!!

I am sure most of you could give a rats ass about this...but it made me happy, and it's high time I wrote about something happy for a change, don't ya think?? LOL