HI everyone…
I’ll let you keep guessing about my title and show you something HUGE first. Day before yesterday my hubby went to his garden to pick the cucumbers and LOOK WHAT HE BROUGHT BACK! It is the biggest cuke I’ve ever seen…
It’s a Japanese cucumber and he likes them because the seeds inside are small and they tend to not be bitter! We haven’t sliced it yet but probably will tomorrow. It could make a whole meal for a family because it weighs a whopping 2.7 pounds! :o)
I had to do a little bit of creative photography!
Well, as much as I’d like to tell you the red leather shoes are finished… they aren’t. They are in the works, but not done enough to show. Maybe tomorrow… maybe not.
I got a call today from a friend asking if I might consider something… (I knew what that meant… alterations!) Yep, it was.
One of the young girls from Colombia, South America, who was a student at the University here in town, is getting married and wanted our pastor to marry them. I’m not exactly sure when this happened, but her mother corresponded with Barbara and got all the necessary measurements and made Barbara a beautiful wedding dress. She mailed it here, (I think) so she’d have it for the wedding, which is Saturday! When Barbara tried it on today, it needed some altering.
We stopped by the dorm where she and her sister are staying to see what needed to be done. The hem was too long, and the bust was slightly too large, and she wanted the lace sleeves tighter to her arms. I studied it, but didn’t have any pins with me so it was pretty much a guessing game on how much to take it in. The hem needed to be turned up one hems width and stitched. That’s the way her mom had made it.
She just took the word of the friend who called me and willingly gave her dress to me to bring home and try to fix it as soon as possible.
So when I got home, I decided it was SO full there was no way I could sew on it in my sewing room. I had to find someplace that would allow me to spread it out and stay put while I worked on it. I decided to put a card table at the end of my bed, moved one of my sewing machines in there and set up shop!
I decided to knock out the hem first… Easy Peasy… right? /wrong! This might be hard to explain or understand, but when you have a long skirt with a train… it’s not hemmed straight across. There are rounded curved pieces at the bottom and in some parts it is straight across. Barbara’s mom had just turned under about 1/8″ and then turned that up in about a 2″ hem, then stitched it around the bottom. This skirt was TWELVE YARDS around! Did I say TWELVE??? Some of the areas were like this… perfectly straight and stitched nicely…
Other parts of the hem were twisted and curled and didn’t want to cup under and lay flat… like this…
Since Barbara wanted me to turn it up one hems width… about 2″, I had lots of puckering to deal with. I thought maybe if I just held it taut as I stitched the hem in place, it might lay flat when I was done. Silly me… no such thing happened. I ended up picking that whole hem out with a seam ripper… VERY CAREFULLY!
The second go around, I decided it would take some time, but hand basting the hem with about 1/2″ long stiches might hold the hem where it needed to be… so round and round and round we went… and in the really hard to control places, some of my stitches looked more like stabilizing stitches like I used in Tailoring…
After it was all basted in place…
…I carefully stitched the hem in place from the top side of the dress. It seemed to be more forgiving and less puckering. Here is what it looked like…
It’s a very pretty dress… here are a few shots of it laying on my bed…
I steamed the hem and was pretty pleased with how it finally looked. I had my doubts that first time around!
I took it off my bed and put it in the guest room and laid it out for a few more pictures.
I know what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! I do see some little red shoes in my future… maybe if things progress faster than the hem did, you might see them too!
I’ll have to figure out about the hat band later.. no time for that today…
See you tomorrow,
Blessings, Jeanne
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cucumber of any kind that was that big!! Yes, you could feed a lot of people with it!
So it’s Jeanne to the rescue again, huh? You did a great job on the hem of that beautiful gown. Yes, there are times when we simply must do the hand basting, and take extra steps in order to get a professional look to the alterations. Good job, Jeanne.
I have all my pictures loaded into the computer now–it took me quite a while this evening, earlier. Hopeful in the next day or two I can get a few sent to Jeanne to use in the blog when needed.
Looking forward to your photos, Charlotte!
Wow, that cucumber should win first prize at the state fair! I guess it really liked all the rain we have been getting! Just what are your plans for it?
What a beautiful dress, Jeanne! They came to the best to fix it, for sure! Nobody else could be trusted to do alternations like that and do it as well as you! That is a beautiful dress, so elegant and modest, compared to some I see now. You did a beautiful job!
So nice to hear from Anne, and I am looking forward to Charlotte’s pictures soon!
Well, we were gone all day yesterday, until time to cook when we got home. After I talked to the pain doc he checked my MRI and realized I have a pinched nerve, when means a different back shot soon.
I read the yesterday’s blog last night and so glad to read Anne’s notes. So nice for Barbara and Rosemary to have time with family. Peyton and I just came home from church and cooked a steak dinner because we had saved it from the old freezer and didn’t want to throw it out. We will go out to eat for his Father’s Day later. He heard from his kids and my sons too.
Jeanne, I love the tiny dress and hat. That red trim is great on the dress.
You are so kind to take on that wedding dress! The young lady went to the right person to fix it just right.
We are off to water aerobics in a few, so Y’all have a good day!
Sure hope that shot can fix your pinched nerve. Please take care.
A special note for Barbara: Thank you for sharing your story, Barbara in SE Texas. There are so many great thoughts about struggles in life. I am sure you understand that the other siblings do not really want to get involved… perhaps because they will be shunned as well. “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” Martin Luther King, Jr. I read your response yesterday, and I understand completely. Our lives are fleeting, …. their lives are fleeting too. We will keep each other in our prayers. In all cases, there are broken hearts and we have to protect ours. 💔
Dear Rosemary, thanks for the wonderful quote from Rev Martin Luther King! It is definitely inspirational.
Happy Tuesday everyone!!!! Yesterday we had a productive day IN THE BASEMENT…. oh we found a lot of Christina’s treasures, and treasures, and incredible things. We had a lot of empty boxes and put them aside and then the grand girls filled their boxes with treasures
So that was a great day, and today hopefully will be double productive, we will have to start earlier than after lunch. So….
Jeanne, that is a HUGE cucumber. I love it standing on a doll stand next to a lovely AG girlie.
I will show this to my grand girls.
The wedding dress. I am happy you took on this task. What a beautiful dress. This is, I fully admit, beyond my skill but if I had to, I think I could, but not with confidence. You did a supremely careful neat and tidy finish here. Well done.
I am gonna run off, and come back later to read this evening, the latest, Those girls are going to be on fire, and I better get perky
Have a super wonderful day everyone
What fun for the grands, and also for you to get rid of some of the treasures.
Definitely wedding dress alterations take precedence over red shoes. What a thoughtful person you are Jeanne. Such meticulous work too. Congrats on a job well done. It is a lovely dress.
As to the giant cucumber, which I thought was a runaway zucchini, it is amazing. Especially since ours are flopping this year after being attacked by perhaps sow bugs. Not sure. Anyway, we too love the Japanese varatials and those twisty ones as well. Congrats to George on a fab crop. So jealous here.
I actually did not pull a weed yesterday, but was able to sew the trim on the skirt of week two sew along. Yay! Since we may hit 90 this afternoon, I hope to be able to get a little more done today. Like sew on the sleeves. Still not a clue how to transfer a printed design on paper to the belt as I would like though. Doing embroidery by hand is not my favorite thing, and unfortunately I’m a dud at figuring out how to do it on my machine. Hoping for a lightning bolt moment on this one.
Good idea to stay inside instead of yard work, Joy. Looking forward to seeing you sewing results! I miss sewing , but have to go over to trying to make some money selling more of my stash of dolls and doll clothes.
Alterations will never be my thing, and I’ve done enough to know that to be true. You are a very brave lady to take on such a task where the dress is non-forgiving in many ways. But it is a very lovely wedding gown and I’m glad your second idea worked out so well. After nearly falling on my face a week ago at church while wearing my choir robe, I decided taking up the hem was in order. We don’t sing except for special Sundays so once I take it off I forget about it until I trip over it the next time. This time I put it with my purse to be sure to take it home. Hemming it was a breeze on the machine. It had some “rounded” areas but since it didn’t need to be precise I just ran the machine until I saw the fabric was going to pucker, took a very small tuck in it and went on. It worked well and there were no “points’ along the bottom, although it really wouldn’t have mattered.
I will be heading out shortly to meet DIL Dionne and the grandkids for lunch at Rainforest Cafe. Then we will head to Burlington to (hopefully) find a dress for Jaiden to wear in a pageant she is in next Monday. Right now her parameters in clothing are difficult as she feels she needs to be covered from head to toe in whatever she wears (usually pants and a hoodie). She is 13 and if I had known about it sooner I would have suggested she wait another couple years before doing this. It is not a “Jon Benet” pageant but more based on citizenship and values. No make-up for anyone under 15 and then only light eye shadow and mascara for the older girls. Andrea did this pageant once but it was the summer after she graduated from high school. She also had years of dance and theater behind her so talent wasn’t a problem, although it did surprise me she chose singing rather than dance as her talent. Jaiden’s talent is more in the area of things like drawing, which isn’t one of the talents in the program so she is doing a reading. The problem will be trying to find her a dress that is acceptable for the pageant. She is not fond of colors even though her favorite when she was younger was pink, so it is going to be a battle to find something. And she needs a nice pantsuit too. I’m not going to go into the fact that all of this should have been figured out months ago when it would have been less stressful. I’ve decided I’m going to take my Rollator walker because it has a seat and I figure I will have to do a lot of standing without it. I’m going to tell Jaiden to think of her dress as a costume. If she were in a play she would have to wear what she was told to, and this is pretty similar to that. When Dionne signed her up she had no clue what she was in for and I didn’t find out till the deed was done, so we’ll have to make the best out of it. Winning the pageant is not even on our radar. It’s all about surviving the event at this point. Andrea had the poise, talent and appropriate clothes and it was still stressful. But she did make 1st runner up which was fine with us. Gratification and we didn’t have to travel to another state for the finals.
Patiently awaiting the little red shoes.
Wow, Barbara, sounds like a big deal for Jaiden !! I hope all goes well. I hope you will be able to send some photos when it happens.
All that cuke needs is a wig and hat!! Hope it tastes as good as it looks!
It’s wonderful how you helped a young bride with a dilemma, hugs and kudos to you.
I’d like to see tattered red white and blue flowers on the hat. Those flowers you make and pull threads from the edges. Or even just one color. Can’t wait to see it all.
Have a great day all.