The Wedding, Part Two

In Which Everyone Gets Dressed Up
And I Get All Sentimental Over $30 Worth Of Satin

(read part one)

Even as I was standing in David's Bridal admiring myself in the dress I was about to buy, I was thinking about how my girls would be dressed for the wedding.

I had to keep in mind their individuality.  Thea and Faith, especially, have very different styles.  I wanted each girl to be dressed in her own way, in something that made her feel happy, but still have all three of them complement each other and me.  My green sash planted the seed that grew into the idea we went with -- each girl would pick her own white dress, and then would wear a colored sash with it in her favorite color:  Blue for Thea, pink for Faith, and purple for Holly.

I figured it would not be easy to find dresses to each of their likings, but actually it did not prove too difficult for Faith.  At Burlington Coat Factory she tried on a total of four dresses, and the fourth was the winner.

This was not the dress we picked (it is hanging on the wall behind her),
but doesn't Faith look adorable in this one?

Thea, however, was every bit as difficult as I expected.  We traversed the entire mall (and Arundel Mills is pretty big) and she didn't even find anything worthy of trying on.

In the meantime, Dan searched online for a shirt to wear (smart guy).  He already owned a pair of white linen pants which were perfectly beachy and yet dressy.  He wanted a similarly classy looking Hawaiian shirt.  Originally he thought he might get a blue one, but as the idea of the girls' colored sashes fleshed out, he didn't want to take the chance of clashing with one of them or of this whole thing ending up a mish-mash of color.  Eventually he found a black shirt with a white flower print down one side at HulaOut.com that was perfect.

Here we are on Valentine's Day, still smiling.  Look what a good sport Dan was as I obsessed over every detail of our attire, and he finished his part after an hour or so browsing the internet on his laptop while in bed.
Wait.... who is the good sport here?

Thea's dress search took us to Marley Station Mall one Sunday afternoon where we spent what seemed like four hours in Vivace Bridal while Thea tried on what seemed to be fifty prom-type dresses.  Most were too fancy, too sexy/trashy (in my mom opinion), or too expensive, but we finally came to an agreement on one.  It had detachable spaghetti straps, which Thea did not want to wear, but I was adamant she would not go strapless.  It also had black piping along the folds of the skirt, but I gave in on that since Dan was wearing black.

Modeling the dress at home.  Notice how Thea has strategically arranged her hair
to give the illusion that her dress is indeed strapless.

Luckily Holly was just excited to wear a fancy white dress and couldn't care less where it came from, so a friend from church gave us a flower girl dress her daughter had worn in a wedding years ago.  It was slightly large on Holly, but I fixed that by shortening and re-sewing the straps.

Off to Joann Fabric to get the material for the girls' sashes.  Dan and I picked vividly colored satin and got about three times the amount of each that I actually ended up needing.  Then I spent the next couple of weeks measuring, sewing, ironing, and cursing.  Each sash needed to be a different length and width.  I foolishly decided Thea's and Faith's should be pleated to really look like they went with their dresses.  Keep in mind that I had not done any real sewing in approximately twenty years.  Not going to lie -- there was cursing.

But the result... just as I had imagined.

I mean, look!  I bought the green sash from David's Bridal, but I made the other three.  You can tell they were done by an amateur when you see the way the satin puckered under my needle, and how the pleat sizes are uneven, but I'm still pretty darn proud of them.  They were custom made to be perfect for each girl in each dress.

Sorry, not done bragging about these sashes yet.  :)  The piece de resistance comes next.  This idea was born while I stood there on the platform at David's admiring myself in the mirror and thinking the preliminary thoughts of each girl somehow having her own color.  What I really wanted was a way to tie it all together -- a way to symbolize that in this new marriage, along with me would come a little bit of each of them.

So, with some of the leftover satin from each of the three sashes, I made flowers.  This was time-consuming but not very difficult at all, after I looked over a few tutorials on the internet.  For each flower I cut out 12 to 15 circles of varying sizes.  Using a candle, I just barely melted the circumference of each circle.  This would keep the satin from fraying, and also curled the fabric just enough to give it a very petal-like texture.  Then I held the center of each circle over the candle just until it puckered.

I assembled each flower by hot gluing the circles together, with a dab of glue in each center.  To the top and final circle or two I gave an extra pinch to give it a little more shape.

Beautiful!

I pinned these three flowers, representing my three girls, to my green sash.  It turned out just as lovely as I had imagined, and the meaning behind it was priceless to me, no matter who else noticed.

OK, I think I'm done bragging about the sashes now.  But never fear, there is more nuttiness to come, because wanting to be all unique and sh** AND being a cheapskate always equals going overboard in, yes, a Martha Stewart way.

All this and more in The Wedding, Part Three!

(How many of these egotistical "parts" will there be, you ask?
AS MANY AS I DECIDE THERE WILL BE.)