Hooray!!

I finished the wedding dress last night!!  It's done!  And she's very happy with it and so am I!  It's such a relief to be done and to not have to stress about it anymore.  I did way more stressing and worrying than she did.  She was the perfect customer and if I could be guaranteed that they would all be like this I'd be tempted to do more commissions...  I will post pictures after the wedding.  Lots and lots!

Anyway, the end is now almost in sight.  It's on to finishing up the Pioneer Trek stuff this weekend.  I'm going tonight to help sew, and will be making ~5 skirts next week to have on hand just in case.  Then next Thursday I'm going out of town for the wedding and to visit my family, which I'm really excited for.  Then when I get back, it's the actual Trek!  So I have to make sure it's all done pretty much by next Wed.  I think it's doable. 

And then I'll be free!  I told myself I'd take like a two week break from sewing or just do little projects (like the embroidered pocket I started - will post soon), but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.  I have a million projects I want to work on and need to get going.  No deadlines really, which is good, but I want them now!  But no, now it's time to organize and clean my life up a little bit!  The sewing area is a disaster!

A bit of rambling...

Oh man.  I have been just wiped out since Costume Con last weekend.  Sorry for not sharing any pictures yet!  I have uploaded them to my computer, just not the internet yet!  I'm putting it on the list though!

I haven't had much time to relax since coming back last week.  I'm still in the middle of moving and am getting started on the wedding dress I'm making!

So that Couture sewing book in the last post?  AMAZING!  So many things I have never heard of, techniques that will be perfect for the dress and can be used on future costumes as well!  I am already more than half way through it.  I highly reccomend it!  Maybe a lot of my costuming buddies know this stuff already, but I've been sewing for 12 years and seriously, so much of it is new to me.  I am so glad that I started hand-sewing dresses this last year.  I think it will be really helpful for me as I'm doing this dress.  I'm more comfortable with it and my stitches are much smaller now!

I don't think I'm going to be handsewing the entire dress, but I will be hand basting all of it especially and even if I machine stitch some of the seams.  The lace I will have to applique entirely by hand I'm thinking.  I'm still trying to work out how I'm going to do that exactly, but I'll need to play around with the placement on the bodice when I have a better working toile.  Anyway, it's making me really excited to work on this dress (not that I wasn't before, I was just nervously dreading it a bit) and I'm feeling very confident.

I also never realized that many couture garments are finished inside the way I do a lot of my costumes now.  I'm pretty sure I'll be putting a nice lining inside this, but it's kind of fun to see that the techniques haven't changed much over the last 150 years... :)