Our Handmade Life

Tis Better to Give... Part II...

    If every beloved guest at our event warranted a handmade picnic bag of seedy-chimey-birdhousey-goodness, what then for the guests who put in all their elbow grease to help us make the whole day happen? On such a tiny budget and with much of it already accounted for, how could we give an extra thank you to our many helpers to let them know that we truly acknowledged and appreciated their friendship and work, beyond our effusive verbal gestures of gratitude!

    Our answer? Giant versions of our smaller gift bags! We loved the picnic grab bags so much we really felt no need to depart from the theme, and didn't want to deprive our helpers of the delights found in the regular guest bags, so we just turbo charged their version of this fun take home gift. Rather than the cozy little birdhouses used for the first project, our 20 helpers (brides maids, bride grooms, close family, stuff loaners and carriers...) received full fledged bird mansions ready to house any burgioning bird family in need of a good new home. The raw wood houses were only $5 a piece on sale at a big box craft store (Michael's), and came in such a fun variety of shapes we had a hard time choosing our 20. We ended up with birdhouses shaped like barns, churches, outhouses, salloons, and even pirate ships, and everyone had fun comparing their prize when the bags were handed out. We gave larger envelopes of wildflower seeds, enough to start a lovely garden by a porch or in a window box, with the same pretty stamps and bigger paper bag envalopes. A large and more verbose thank you note went into each one, as well as a wind chime, because hey, who doesn't love a wind chime? To house all this bounty, we made 20 re-usable fabric bags, one for each recipient to use for shopping or schlepping to their hearts content for years to come. Overall each bag cost about $8, and went home with our helpers lending them the feeling of love, appreciation, and abundance that we wanted to impart.

    Since you've already made your smaller gift bags, you don't need any pointers on stamps and seeds and gift collecting, so we'll just straight to making the re-usable bag, a great gift wrapper for any event-- it looks expensive and thoughtful (the thoughtful part is true) but costs you just about nothing!

DIY Reusable Fabric Bag

Step 1: Starting with the fabric, I once again turned to my trusty, dollar-a-yard, bought by the bold muslin. Yes this is the least expensive option available to me, but I'd use it anyway. It's just so crisp and simple, I find it to be my favorite base for anything I make. To that I added a piece of calico fabric bought for a dollar a yard at Wal-Mart. I don't normally recommend buying anything at that particular store, but dollar fabric is dollar fabric. I picked out several different calico patterns just to have a fun variety, then laid out all the fabric I had and cut rectangles measuring about 2 feet by 3 feet.

Step 2: Before going any further into sewing, I took my 20 muslin squares and laid them out on flattened cardboard. Using the tree stencil I'd used for my brides maid dresses (see previous posts), I stenciled a big tree onto each piece along with a bird sitting next to it and waited for the paint to dry. The tree was a bit of a pain since it was so big and detailed, so even though I really liked the end results, I might pick a simpler stencil if I do this project again.

Step 3: Once the paint had REALLY dried, I lined up each of my muslin pieces with each of my calico pieces. I paired them so that when the muslin piece and calico piece were put together, each ones printed side was facing outward, with each ones non printed side touching each other in the middle.

Step 4: Folding the newly paired muslin-calico rectangles in half, I put the tree to the inside and the calico to the outside. Then, each pairing went to the sewing machine, where I ran a stitch down each short side. Turned right-side-out, each stitched piece was now a stenciled muslin bag with a calico liner inside. If you prefer a rounded bottom rather than a squared on, you can simply stitch down the sides and then curve into the bottom while sewing to get that effect. Picture your stitch line looking like a big capital D at the bottom of your bag, rather than a simple rectangle shape.

Step 5: Now make a simple fold to the inside with the fabric at the top of your bag, to hem the top edge and finish the look. You can double fold this if you like, but it's durable enough with a single fold and I like the raw edge, so that is your own style choice. If you single fold, fold in about 2 inches and then stitch the fabric down. If you double fold, fold about 1 inch and then another inch, so that you don't lose too much of the bag's height.

Step 6: Whip up some straps! I used the muslin and calico scraps for this, cutting strips as long as I could get, about 3 inches wide in length. With my trusty strap scraps in hand, I folded each one in half length-wise, then folded the two open edges in again, creating a closed tube. I stitched these closed by running a stitch down my folded open edge first, then down the other edge for continuity. If folding and stitching fabric as you go is playing it a little fast and loose for you, you can iron the creases in for an easier stitching experience-- I just don't have that kind of patience!

Step 7: Once your strap strips have been stitched up, go ahead and cut them into the lengths you'd like for your bag, I cut mine around a yard each, but you can go as short or long as you like. Find the middle of the top edge of your bag, and put in a pin on each side. Then find the middle point between that pin and the side seam on each side, and put a pin there, removing the original pin in the middle. This marks for you where your straps should be sewn. Now grab your bags and straps, stitch them together, and voila! You have handmade gift bags for the masses, you look like the loving and fabulously crafty hostess that you are, and you have plenty of cash left in your pocket for whatever fun you still want to have!

Step 8: Stuff those awesome bags full of great stuff and then wait with baited breath for the fun job of handing them out!

A Labor of Love-- How to Make the Things that Make a Space Your Own

   

     Ok people, let's get down to the brass tacks-- isn't that what they say when it's time for the nitty-gritty work to commence? Filling a space with armloads of handmade goods isn't done overnight, and it isn't done alone either. Before I share with you the in's and outs of decorative handwork, I want to be clear about two things: 1.) It is time consuming but worth it, so if you're really going to DIY your perfect day, get ready to spend every night for several months working your little fingers to the bone-- in a fun way :)! And 2.) Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes your community of friends and family to pull something this large together, and really, you and I wouldn't have it any other way, right?!

    While I did the vast bulk of this work on my own in my home through long blustery winter nights, I could not have made my dress with out almost all the work and inspiration coming from my dress-revamping friend, Angela. I could not have baked the lovely cake that her mother made for us. I could not have set up my wedding (which took a team of 20 people) the morning of the event, and gotten ready for said wedding at the same time. So I have to send out a universe-size thank-you to all of my wonderful helpers, and I also have to help you chomping-at-the-bit readers to "keep it real"! Yes, you'll be working a lot when you are hand making the days and events of your own life, and yes, you'll still need other people along that way. After all, isn't communing with other people what weddings and life are all about?!

And now for those brass tacks I mentioned...

DIY TRIANGLE BUNTING BY THE MILE

For a huge blank space like the one I was trying to fill, I knew the first step would be to have plenty of texture, color, and movement, up in the air, as far as the eye could see. To this end, I made enough scrap fabric bunting to wrap around the whole park area several times over, allowing for plenty of criss-crossing and loop-di-looping overhead. The effect was just what I'd hoped for, a fluttery light hearted home-y feel that left everyone smiling under the breezy canopy of calico's and plaids. 

Step 1: To begin this big project (it took me a few weeks to get it all cut, stitched, and coiled away in bags), I started out with a trip to my local thrift store. I don't mean the established and more popular thrift stores where people are shopping for brand name clothes, I mean the little church-run kind, off in the woods somewhere, where clothes are still sold by the bag for a dollar a crammed-in pile. When you're going to chop them up anyway, no one cares what designer name the tag boasts. So off to the nearby town of Ebeneezer went I, where I crammed plastic shopping bags full of skirts and dresses of every print, and then proceeded to shamelessly flirt with the sweet and a little simple guy behind the register to get out with an even more steep discount. I believe my total cost was something like 5 bucks, and I left with a backseat full of clothes.

Step 2: After choosing the size of triangle you'd like to use (I went with BIG, probably a foot on each side, to save a little on sewing time in the end) and procuring a really good pair of scissors, begin cutting up your clothes. I like to chop up the clothes along the seams first, to provide myself with a more flat and workable piece of fabric to cut from. If you like, you can make yourself a triangle template from a piece of paper and trace the shape with a marker onto the fabric, cutting from the shapes you draw. I didn't bother with this, preferring to blaze through willy-nilly and just get the work done. This did leave me with shapes that were not completely uniform in size, and some that only slightly resembled triangles, but I liked the home-made look this achieved, so it worked for me. If you prefer a more proper look, then I suggest the template.

Step 3: Make a stack of triangles as high as you feel you'll want to sew. I'm not exaggerating when I say that my stack probably reached my hips when standing, but I'm also not exaggerating when I say I made miles of bunting, so don't feel you need to be quite as industrious as I was, unless you also have a big space to fill and a lot of nights to work on it! Remember as you build your stack to alternate the patterns you are putting there, as the order you build up your fabric in will be the order you end up stitching them in as well, so we don't want a whole row of pink polka dots with nothing in between.

Step 4: Find a roll of strong cotton string or twine, thick enough to hold the weight of your fabulous creation, but thin enough not to break the needle on your machine should you bump into it while sewing. There's nothing more terrifying than sewing peacefully along while daydreaming about your wedding day, only to have the sharp end of a needle suddenly slam into something too thick, snap in half, and come shooting straight out at your eye! Heed my warning readers, I speak from experience. Leaving a nice long piece of the twine bare (a good 6 feet, so that it can be wrapped and tied around any tree or pole without interrupting your bunting), and then start your sewing. Drawing from your stack, pick up one triangle at a time, fold one end over the twine so that about an inch overlaps in back, and simply stitch the triangle closed over the twine, tightly enough that it won't slip around once you've stitched it in place. If you're wondering about the raw edges on the rest of the triangle, I left mine that way on purpose. Again, I like the handmade feel of a raw edge, and more importantly, hemming the edges of all that fabric would have tripled my work time. And while I loved making all this swag for my wedding, I didn't love it THAT much! Also, make sure that each new piece of fabric you add faces the same way, with its print on the outside, and the fold over stitch in back. Got your first triangle sewn nicely into place all pretty and perfect? Great! Now do that a thousand more times, and you'll have all the bunting loveliness a girl could ever want!

Step 5: You're actually done at this point, provided you've thought to trim your threads along the way, which I highly suggest, so just a few more pointers to keep you on the right track. Do make sure that when you are done with your long bunting banner, you coil it up nice and neat before you bag it. Otherwise it will come out looking like what my lingerie used to look like before I figured out that I couldn't just wad it up in a ball and toss it into the washer and dryer as if it were a pile of sweatshirts-- a tangle blob of fabric that will never un-knot itself without the help of Rumpelstiltskin himself, and you know what a hard bargain he drives.

Also, if you have so many triangles (like me) that you end up using more than one ball of twine, be sure to leave 6 feet of empty space at the other end of your bunting as well, for tying purposes.

Lastly, if you are still harboring a fear of the sewing machine, a malady a surprising number of modern people share, I suggest two things: 1.) Get over this fear so that we can get on with crafting! And 2.) You can actually do this whole project with hot glue instead of a needle and thread, it will be just as pretty and strong, though your fingers might get a little burn-y.

And best of all, bunting lasts forever, and can be pulled out again and again for parties or sunny days for the rest of your life! Yay for bunting!

 

You Can Do This: Make Your Own Wedding Dress

   

    I'll be the first to admit that my sewing skills, while adequate, are not exactly top notch when it comes to the fine tailoring of delicate materials. But with a lot of creativity and a little ingenuity, I did manage to DIY my wedding dress, and you can too! Yes, my wonderful friend Angela who up-cycles dresses for a living was the MAJOR backbone of this project. But I'm willing to bet that many of you out there have a friend or aunt or co-worker so-and-so who is also skilled with a needle and thread and can be of more help to you than you think in this endeavor. And even if you live alone in a cave cut off from all other human contact, we're going to walk through these steps together so that even you can do this yourself!

    First, I think it's ideal to start with an already intact dress. One with a similar shape to the outcome you're designing toward. Not only will this save you SO much time and crying jags, it will also likely cost less than the countless yards of raw material you'd be buying to build your dress from scratch. This principle can also just as easily be applied to your bridesmaid's dresses, your prom dress, or the sun dress you plan to wear to the park this weekend. Basic wedding dresses can be had at garage sales, goodwill type stores, on craigslist or ebay, or in many an old attic. Thinking I was buying a dress I'd wear as it came, I bought my monstrosity of a dress from an on-line store out of China called alightinthebox.com. It came, as I've mentioned before, assaulted with a cascade of hot-glued flattened red plastic flowers down its full length, instead of the beautiful intricate applique in the on-line picture. Once I'd plunked down my $200 for the dress, they website was never accessible to me for contact again, so my complaints of fraud went unanswered. Still, a $200 princess dress that was at least well constructed turned out to be an ok price for a dress I ended up loving after a LOT of adjusting.

    DIY Wedding Dress

Step 1: First things first, spend plenty of time pouring over wedding magazines and ripping out everything that makes your heart pitter-patter (as if you haven't been doing this already). Cut out what you like and collage the end results on a piece of poster board. Now look at the themes which will likely be evident. Do you love long sashes? Full skirts or the fitted look? Bling or plain? Splashes of color, or all white? Rousching? Sleeves? You can see where I'm going here... Now sketch or write out which details you want to be a part of the finished product, and hit the second hand stores or on-line shops to find the basic shape you want. You can even go to popular bridal stores on their $99 wedding gown sales days and pick something up that's nice and new-- the world is your oyster you dressmaking artistic genius!

Step 2: Now that you have your image in mind and your dress foundation standing on a dress form staring at you in your living room, it's time for fun. For my own dress, the original form was a satin strapless top, but the satin turned out to be dingy (not a big surprise from the plastic flower dress peddlers), and the strapless look wasn't my favorite to begin with-- made me look like an unsuccessful linebacker. Angela and I agreed that the best solution to this was to simply cover the bodice up entirely with something else, and since I prefer a softer, more "down home" fabric look, we decided I should just hit the mall and find a white t-shirt to top my dress. After lots of agonizing and strange looks from shop-girls, I chose a fitted sheer ivory t with fabric rosettes clustered up one side of the open neckline. We pinned the top over the dress bodice at home, and I put the pointy hypbrid on to model. If you are already following along on this project at home, this is the part where your friend gets out her best scissors and just starts cutting! Angela cut my sleeves off into tank-top straps, and stitched them down in the back along the bodice top. The remaining edges of the top which had been cut away were stitched down to the bodice, and the straps we'd cut from the longer sleeves were left unstitched altogether-- it wasn't like the dress would need to go through the washing machine!

Step 3: With the new top in place, the major construction was done. The joining point between the t-shirt and the ballgown skirt, however, still left something to be desired. To hide the awkward spot, I found some fancy bedazzled bridal fabric at JoAnne's Fabric shop, and Angela stitched it around the waistline over the joining place, darting the fabric as she went along to fit it perfectly to the shape of the dress. This may sound complicated, but when your dress is sitting on a form and the needle is in your hand, you can just work your way along as slowly as you like, and it will turn out fine!

Step4: Creating a new top over an old bodice, then creating a blingy waistband to cover the problem seam, created the new problem of a raw and oddly angled edge at the top of the new blingy waistband. Sort of a "we-solved-the-rat-problem-by-bringing-in-wild-cats-then-solved-the-cat-problem-by-hiring-rabid-dogs-and-now-what-do-we-do-with-the-rabid-dogs" scenario. For the rabid dog/ newly exposed weird blingy seam problem, we added a sash! And can you guess who loves sashes on everything because she repeatedly read Little Women as a child? I do. Your own dress project will likely be a similar process of discovery and problem solving, but as you layer and learn, a beautiful new design will take shape under your fingers-- I promise!

Step 5: The sash was made from strips of stitched together vintage slips, collected at a flea market where whatever you can stuff into a bag costs a dollar. The color was a lovely antiqued ivory, which we simply wrapped around the middle of the bodice over the weird seam. We left it gathered just the way it laid when we pinned it there, and tied it in a simple knot in the back with a borrowed vintage broach over the knot. (My something old were the vintage dress bits, my something new were the sparkly hairpins, and my something blue was polka dotted undies that still make me smile)...

Step 6: To match the flowers at the collar that came with the shirt, and to fulfill my lifelong princess fairy dress daydreams, Angela and I had a craft day and drank milky sweet tea while we made a big fluffy pile of flowers. See the DIY Bridesmaid's instructions to make your own fabric flowers. I eventually finished my tea and went merrily home, and when I saw my dress again, it was dusted from top to bottom in white flowers on white fabric, with a great cluster at the waist to unite the pile of layers we'd started with.

    My dress was more perfect for me than anything I could have found in a shop, partly because it had every detail I'd wanted, and mostly because it was made with some serious funk and love!

DIY Wedding Veil

Step 1: Ok people, this one COULDN'T be any more simple, so if you only choose one thing in your wedding to DIY, save yourself a few HUNDRED bucks and make it the veil. I went to my local fabric store (which happens to be JoAnne's Fabrics, a national chain), picked up one of their adds provided at the door which always has a 40% off coupon inside, and headed to the bridal fabric aisle. There I found a beautiful ivory fabric with a touch of sparkle, some lovely embroidery, and the overall sheerness needed for a veil if you want to see where you're going. I bought a yard of the $25.00/yard fabric with my coupon, and took it home. Any fabric store will have a nice little selection of sheer wedding fabrics for just this purpose, and most run sales or coupons, so pay attention to that because anything with the word "bridal" attached to it starts out pricey.

Step 2: After cutting a bit of this fabric off my original yard to create the sparkly waist of my wedding dress, I had the rest of it left to serve as my veil. So, and here's the hardest part, on the morning of my wedding, while my friends were braiding up my hair, I had my little sister lay the sheer fabric over my head, shorter part with the scalloped edges in front, longer part with the straight edge (because I'd cut the scallops off for my dress) in the back. Once it was situated the way we liked it, Molly took a hairpin and... pinned the veil to my head. That's it. That's how I made my veil, and it was lovely and got its own compliments all day. When I met my soon to be husband in the middle of our guests to begin our ceremony, he lifted the front and pushed it to the back, where it lay perfectly until I tore it off later to play volleyball.

Step 3: There really is no step three since all you really need to do for a great veil is pin some sheer fabric on your head, but if you want one of those veils that gather up onto a comb, here's your third step... After you've located your perfect fabric and a clear hair comb to go with it, simply fold the fabric in half and lay it on a table. working with the folded end (not the two raw edges), use a needle and thread to weave in and out of the fabric from one end to the other, making your stitch length half an inch or so apart. Once you've woven the thread through the fabric, pull the thread tight and scrunch the fabric down the thread, until it is gathered to the size of your comb. Now stitch this gathered end to your comb and ta-da! You have a gathered veil. If your end result seems unfinished to you, top it off with some sparkly bling also available at the fabric store, or with a simple folded piece of cloth cut from the bottom edge of your veil. You just saved your wedding budget for more fun stuff, you crafty girl!

 

DIY Bridesmaid's Dresses-- Your Real Life Dress-up Party!

   

     I never understood the appeal of playing with Barbies. This may be due to my lack of early childhood exposure to soap operas and tv commercials, or perhaps the fact that reading Little Women seemed more appealing to me than reenacting my own limited life experience through oddly shaped plastic dolls. I did have Barbies though, and what I loved to do with them (until my sister Molly got old enough to start switching around their body parts and covering them in straight pins and nail polish) was dress them up and create their living space. Being from the poor side of the tracks, I didn't have Barbie accouterments, just some naked dolls and a few mismatched plastic high heels. I learned to make them dresses out of old socks, scrap fabric, and scrounged buttons. I discovered glue and glitter for details, then fabric paint, and even wallpaper samples. Those Barbies with no life stories had the best wardrobe around in my opinion, though they never once thanked me for my work, or modeled my pieces in public for me. Enter bridesmaids-- my living breathing dress up party! Finally I can dress up real people any way I like and parade them around for my own hand picked audience-- who would give up this chance for a couple of boring old store-boughten gowns?!

    Like the boutonnieres, I am explaining how I up-cycled my own bridesmaid's dresses, which will likely be different than the vision you have for your own event. So feel free to take the instructions here, and then shift and tweak them into whatever fabulous picture you have in your own mind's eye for the big day.

    Though I do sew for a living and could have made my dresses from scratch, I often find that dresses bought on clearance or at a discount cost less than the fabric I would use to make them myself, not to mention the time they save cutting and stitching new patterns. For this reason I chose to up-cycle both my dress and my bridesmaid's dresses, allowing me to spend my time on creative details rather than construction.

DIY Bridesmaid's Dresses

Step 1: Loosely sketch out the shape and look of the dress you want. Is it long or short? Empire waist or A-shaped? Cotton or silk? Is it patterned or plain, and what are its details? Ribbon, painted image, flowers, petticoats? Once your vision is clear, start shopping. It's often easy to get your start on-line, try searching the basic big store's websites for the cornerstone dress you want. I recommend starting out with something rather plain so that you have the freedom to build it into what you like. I found my dresses at Old Navy for $30 each, they were brown cotton sundresses with a v-neck, and they were the perfect foundation for the look I was going for.

Step 2: Now that you have your starting point, it's time to get right into the fun of decorating. For my dresses, I chose a tree stencil and fabric flowers. Our wedding was a sort of farm-girl-fancy nature loving affair, so the look and theme carried over nicely with these details. First I addressed the tree, a little daunting but so worth it in the end! I looked and looked for a tall tree stencil but couldn't find one that worked for me. This meant I had to make my own stencil. You can buy a stencil template at a craft store, which is just a big piece of plastic, but I find that if you have an old deconstructed cereal box at home, it works just as well and saves your money for more fun things. Using my cereal box and an exacto-knife, I drew a nice tall tree onto my cardboard, then cut the image out slowly and carefully until the shape was complete and ready to be painted.

Step 3: Next I stretched the dress over another piece of cardboard to keep the fabric taught and to prevent the paint from soaking through. I then mixed the paint I'd chosen (I used a different colored tree for each dress for a little variety) with fabric medium in a small cup, a 50/50 blend of each. This is important because it allows the paint to relax and move with the fabric, as well as making it washable should your friend want to wear it again. After this I simply laid the stencil down on the fabric, dipped my sponge brush into the paint, and stenciled away! Easy as pie, and the dresses turned out great! One note of caution though, occasionally a stencil will get wet on its backside while doing multiple paintings, so be sure to check the back for excess paint before moving on to the next dress!

DIY Fabric Flowers

Step 1: Fabric flowers are fun and easy to make and scatter everywhere! They can spruce up a dress, an event, or even just a plain old Wednesday! For my own project, I liked the pop of red against the brown sundress, so I chose red and white calico fabric to make my flowers. Choose any scrap of fabric that strikes your fancy, and cut about 2 inches wide by about 8 to 12 inches long, depending on how wide you want your flower to be.

Step 2: Using either a glue gun or a needle and thread, slowly twist and wind the fabric around itself. Keep the coil you are making flat, and glue or stitch it at each turn until all your fabric is connected to itself and you hold a lovely new flower in your hands. Stitch a button in its center, and you are now a creator of fabric flowers!

 Step 3: Now that you've made your first fabric flower, make a whole pile of them and turn your world into a bouquet explosion! For my dresses I stitched three flowers each onto the upper left shoulder strap, balancing out the tree on the lower right side. You can put yours on the hem, the waistband, on hair clips or jewelry, or make a bouquet in lieu of live flowers. Enjoy!

 

Ceremony DIY's-- Put Away Your Wallet and Get Out Your Opposable Thumbs

Through the process of putting together a wedding myself, I have come to really resent the opportunist price gouging that most businesses engage in when it comes to anything wedding related. I remain thoroughly convinced that a garter shouldn't cost less than $10 for the rest of us and over $50 for the overwhelmed and unsuspecting bride. It seems almost mean spirited and certainly unnecessary, particularly if you own your very own set of opposing thumbs!

Therefore thumb-owners, please feel free to borrow any and all ideas you see here, and expand upon them to create whatever your own vision is! Don't let your wedding, ceremony, party, or life be hijacked by people who want to rubber stamp your special moments and pick your pocket clean while doing it. Free up a little time and round up your community of friends, and create, create, create! Not only will you be thrilled with the result, you'll have gained from the journey as well. And your bank account will remain intact to boot!

DIY Boutonnieres

 

Begin your boutonniere with some direction in mind. My own creations are what I'll outline here, but you could easily modify this using flowers, wheat, or even radishes or tiny carrots-- whatever strikes your fancy for your own ceremony.

 

Step 1: Using scraps of fabric from old clothing (economical and has a nice well worn vibe), cut a rectangle of fabric about 3 1/2 by 6 inches, then cut another piece slightly smaller (perhaps 2 by 6 inches) and of a different print.

Step 2: With a needle and thread, fold the fabric into a fan, then stitch the inside meeting point together. This will create a capital D shape, and will look just like the paper fans you used to fold and wave around as a child. Your stitching doesn't have to look good since it will later be covered up, it just has to hold the fabric in its fan shape. Repeat this step with the smaller fabric piece so that you now have two little fabric fans.

Step 3: Clip whatever pieces of decoration you'd like to use in your creation down to the size you'll need to fit your fan. I used fake grass, dried wheat, feathers, and tiny fake flowers, since I wanted it to look homespun, but I also wanted this job to be done well before the wedding. I clipped my nature bits to start around the stitched middle of my fan and end just inside or just outside the outer edge of the bigger piece. You can again really stray from my design here, even adding charms from any craft store to represent your own passions in life-- I stitched little metal music notes onto Josh's boutonniere, but you could go even further than that, adding whatever symbols you like-- dice, tiny animals, little books... the possibilities are endless!

Step 4: Once your pieces are clipped to size, pull out your trusty hot glue gun and get down to the fun part! Arrange your ingredients so that they form a nice shape over the bigger fabric fan, with some sticking out over the edge and some tucked down below it. Just make sure that it's not too symmetrical, which can lead to a crafty-matchy look that you want to avoid. Or that at least I want you to avoid. Once you are happy with your placement, hot glue it all down to your big fan. Again, this will be covered up, so it doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to be sturdy.

Step 5: Finally, it's your smaller fan's time to shine! Lay the smaller fan over the larger one, with the flat edges lined up. It should be a smaller version of the larger shape, and all your glued details should stick out from behind it with none of the rough edges or glue showing. Now, clip a small piece of ribbon with diagonal edges, and place it over the joined middle of the smaller fan, which should be right on top of the joined middle of the larger one. Atop this, place a vintage button. With your needle and thread, stitch the whole piece together, from bottom fan to top to ribbon to button. Put in several stitches to make sure it holds and... Voila! You have a handmade boutonniere! Use a straight pin to secure it to your man and congratulate yourself on a job well done!

 

Let's Talk Hand-Made Wedding Fashion!

   

     It's true, I've been phoning it in until now-- this is the topic I've been waiting for! Your wedding day-- or heck, your graduation day, your birthday, your hand-fasting day, your favorite Wednesday-- it's a day to celebrate and an excuse to dress up to your hearts content! Decorating and choreographing our ceremony and reception was a big pile of hard/fun work. But decorating ourselves was pure joy!

 

    Before we dive right into the big white dress, let's talk men's wear. I know girls are often saddled with a reputation for being the shop-ier, clothing obsessed-ier of the sexes, but in this Josh may have out done me. My plan of attack for wedding shopping was a sort of meandering path from shop to shop, noting what I liked or did not like and waiting for something to strike my fancy. Josh on the other hand, knew exactly what he was looking for as if he'd been waiting to wear it since he was finally convinced as a child that he couldn't go everywhere naked. He printed similar cuts and colors from internet images and showed them to every shop girl as if we were canvasing for our lost family member. If we found the right shape but a shade too dark or light, Josh cast it off with disdain and we were on to the next store-- hunters relentlessly stalking our prey. We finally found his pants, vest, and tie at Express in the local mall (thought I think we'd have hitch-hiked to Borneo if necessary), and purchased it after hiding what we wanted, waiting for it to go on sale, and printing up on line coupons to match the price we preferred. His shirt was stalked down and nicely wrapped into submission at Banana Republic, where he also found his "second" ensemble which he changed into for the reception. Did you know that men are expected to wear not one but two great new outfits at their own wedding? Josh enlightened me on this topic when he discovered that everything he wanted was on the 70% off rack. I chose to believe him because his new clothes made him so happy and he really did look great, though if any readers out there have evidence to the contrary regarding this "two outfits for the groom" tradition, feel free to let me know...

 

     When it came to our wedding party, we shared a great dislike for this common practice we've heard of in which the bride and groom pick out really fancy clothing for their closest friends, and then force said friends to go spend a big pile of cash on a dress or suit that they will likely never wear again. Also, Josh and I were very excited to be wearing our own sort of "farmer fancy" style wedding attire, so while we wanted everyone to look their loveliest, we definitely didn't want anyone wandering around a park in formal evening wear, especially standing next to a slightly more relaxed bride and groom. To this end, we asked about $30 from each of our attendants in clothing cost-- hopefully saving the rest of their money for better wedding gifts!

  

     The grooms men wore simple brown dockers with a white shirt. They were encouraged to rock this look however they saw fit, so some opted for ties or suspenders, while others kept it plain and simple-- just our style. I made the men's boutonnieres myself at a craft day with a table full of awesome girl friends. I call this a work frolic, a term I borrowed from my time with the Amish, but I think everyone else called it Saturday. My next post will be a how-to on everything made for the wedding so far, so tune in to that if you want your own frolic-made man attire.

 

   My bridesmaids looked so sweet and lovely in their little brown sundresses that I bought on clearance at Old Navy. I'd seen some bridesmaid dresses in a magazine that I just loved, with a printed tree stretching up one side, and while I didn't want to spend $200 per dress, I did want something similar for my girls. Also I was in a period of loving handmade fabric flowers on everything I could attach them to (I am still in this period and expect it to last a while). With these finishing touches in mind, I set out on a quest for plain sundresses. My guidelines were that they be free of print (so as not to compete with my tree and flower plans), 100%cotton (because I just love the weft and weave of cotton, as well as it's natural drape and simple beauty), and colored some sort of earth tone, to match the feeling of happy outdoors-iness we were working to create. One tree stencil, three bottles of paint, and 15 hand stitched fabric flowers later, and my brides maids were ready for the big day.

  

    And now for... the wedding dress! While I myself never spent my days doodling the perfect wedding dress into a notebook, I did have it's vague dimensions floating around in the nether regions of my mind, and I'd say it most closely resembled something straight out of my new favorite television reality show, "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding." The more I asked myself after the proposal what I saw myself wearing, the more I realized I wanted something so big it would scar my hips with its sheer weight in toile and be deliciously difficult to move in. I spent hours combing the internet for all the shapes and details I wanted, and countless sunny afternoons combing every bridal shop within driving range. While I was certainly intent on frugality when it came to the wedding budget, I did not consider my wedding dress to apply to this drive for thrift.  Finally the day I'd dreamed of dawned and welcomed me into its sunny embrace-- dress day with my family and friends. I got there at my appointed time, lined my audience up to show their scorecards, and tried on every beautiful dress I'd been drooling over for weeks-- each one poofier and blingier than the last. I even had the rare joy of knowing that any of these dresses could be mine that day, as my wonderful soon to be mother-in-law had brought along her store card. She has a string of daughters! I really did want every dress I tried on. Despite my mother having given me a unisex name and having spelled it like a boy so that I would never be discriminated against as a woman, I have long had a penchant for huge full dresses (though I did always try to climb trees in them) and all things girlie, and on that bridal pedestal I was in my own little heaven.

    At this point, two things happened simultaneously. First, as usual, I had a flash of memory that took me back to my time with the Amish, as well as my time at the commune, and my many wedding experiences there. Commune weddings usually involve a lot of nudity and body paint, while Amish weddings are supremely beautiful in their stark plain-ness. I remembered being indescribably happy in these settings. I loved the simplicity of both, and I always felt it allowed for the love and joy of the ceremony to shine through, not filtered through a bunch of frills which can be an unnecessary distraction. At the same moment I looked around me at about 20 other brides milling about the clothes racks and trying on dresses that looked disconcertingly similar to mine. I knew then that I wouldn't be buying a dress here at all. But the dress trying on day? Still totally worthwhile!

 
   The next day I ordered a dress from China that I'd been eyeing for some time, but that I thought might be too weird for a wedding. It was a full ball gown skirt with a fitted strapless bodice, satin lined with a great shape, and its defining look was a cascade of red flowers and green leaves, cut intricately from a rich textured fabric and stitched down the bodice and skirt as if falling down the dress to the ground. A simple silhouette with a memorable flourish. I loved it and was so excited to plunk down my $200 and receive my dress in the mail! When I breathlessly opened my package two weeks later and pulled out what I was to be married in, what I found was just the shape I'd ordered, with perfectly tailored sizing. What made me cry for the rest of the day was the cheap dingy fabric overlaying the bodice, and the garishly red and green PLASTIC FLOWERS AND LEAVES that were HOT GLUED down the whole dress. Having turned down the many great options at the dress shop, I'd just blown my wedding budget on something I wouldn't wear for Halloween, and of course, the website from which I'd purchased did not respond to my mail.

 
   The next day, puffy eyed but determined, I dusted myself off and called my friend Angela. She makes her living up-cycling old dresses and I had the ultimate project for her! Angela was awesome enough not only to turn my wedding dress debauchle into the dream dress I'd always wanted, but she did it as my wedding gift. Who could ask for more? Together we stripped off the offending flowers (so hideously fake I'd find them tacky in a vegas wedding chapel), made new fake flowers, and sprinkled the skirt with them. The bodice was covered completely by a sheer white t-shirt I found at Charlotte Russe in the mall, which came with the same fabric flowers stitched along the neckline. Angela cut the t-shirt into the tank-top shape that I'd wanted, added a sash and more sparkles and flowers, and I found myself wearing the dress that I'd always wanted, even if I hadn't known it until that moment.

  

  Having saved so much on my handmade boutonnieres, I decided to follow the trend and continue saving on flowers all around. My bridesmaids, rather than carrying traditional bouquets, were given kerosene lanterns for their walk down the aisle. We liked the imagery this evoked, as well as its reminder of a lifestyle that Josh and I had both lived, which involved these same lanterns as our only source of night time light. My bouquet was made and given to me by Angela's husband, our great friend Wade, and was purchased at the farmer's market that morning for a total of $6. It had my favorite flower, the bachelor's button mixed in with the other leaves and blooms, and it was perfect. I loved it! My veil was made from a yard of beautifuly embellished wedding fabric I bought with a half-off coupon at the fabric store.  The only other accessories we and our wedding party wore that day were our own big smiles, since none of us had bothered to buy or wear shoes...