Two steps forward... You know the rest...

This is mainly for my sister Teresa's benefit as she has been snooping around my blog trying to find pictures of the dress besides just the pattern front. Hi Terese!

As of Saturday afternoon I was *THIS* close to being done with the wedding gown! The hem is done, I put the tucks in and tried it on the bride. It looks beautiful on her! The pic makes it look like it might be TOO tight, but that is adjustable and the waist stay will hold it up.
Oh to be THAT skinny again! Maybe when I get to 80 years old... But then I won't care.

Pay no attention to how twisted up the lacing is. This was a rush job of lacing!

The tucks were safety pinned in during these pictures and I found some mistakes on where I pinned them during the actual job of stitching them in. Problem corrected!

Only problem that we really found during the fitting is that the waist stay that I put in shows a bit and kind of looks like she's wearing granny undies... So... She came up with the idea to NOT do the sparklies around the top & hem of the gown but make a jewel-like belt to wear over the area of the waist stay.

BRILLIANT! Literally.

Oh, Saturday morning I forgot to take Meri's dress with me on the mini-roadtrip, so no handwork got done that morning. Got to talk to my honey for all morning, JUST us two! We had a good time. Then I took a nap in the car. I worked on Meri's hem later in the day and only got a portion of the hemming done. Still working on that over lunches this week.

Yesterday after church, Tiffany and I went to JoAnns and picked up some sparkly ribbon and some jewel strips that I'm hand stitching together in 4 little rows onto the ribbon. When the strips lay on the ribbon itself, it looks gorgeous... But when I start putting in stitches to hold them into place, they started to shift around and look door-knobby. But I kept at it. I might as well be consistent with the door-knobbiness. I'm about half way done with the belt and then will handstitch it into place on the dress. Actually with the satin behind it, the little belt looks REALLY pretty!

The belt will go into one of the laced loops and be stitched around the inside.

THEN to add a new challenge to my "Project Wedding", Meri and Tiffany (Not Heidi Klum) decided that maybe Meri's dress needs a corset type belt. So I started work on that. No pattern, just lots of measuring and by guess and golly. My idea is to have it underneath the outer sheer layer, but they're pushing for the outer layer itself. hmmm.. It will definitely be adjustable, but I think the detailing of it needs to be softened a little... I think in this situation, my final say will go. But I guess I need to finish it first. If they insist on it being the outer belt, I may spill kool-aid on it. *Thanks for the advice on the kool-aid, Tiff! ;)*

*addendum note* I just realized it CAN'T go underneath the outer layer. I forgot about the zipper... dang.

So far, I've put about 35 seams on that thing and JUST when I got down to maybe 5 left, the sewing machine said *raspberry* *THWRBBWQT* That's probably not how to spell it... Maybe stick out your tongue with your lips around it and blow.

How many of you just did the tutorial on how to do a raspberry? Yeah, I thought so.
So the machine called it quits and I took that as my cue to quit for the night as well. It's probably just over heated. I will get back to it over my lunch break today. I have another sewing machine if this one is kaput.

So... I didn't get ALL the projects I wanted to done this weekend, but there's still time this week, right? right?

Less than two weeks to the big day!