Wedding Journal
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This is the Very Swanky Machine which Sara and I (mostly Sara) will be using for the chuppah embroidery. This will be especially cool with the new plus-size embroidery hoop she just got.
August 24th
Sending out invitations is cool! It's very exciting, I never get this much mail. Every day I get a few more cute little green envelopes in my mailbox, it's really fun.
In other news, my mom has found a dress she likes, which is very happy. Being 4 feet 10 inches tall, she is usually outside of the rather narrow range of body types considered by designers. I had enough trouble finding my own dress, and I'm pretty much in the middle of average, so I can image how annoying shopping is for her.
My next project is to sew the chuppah. Because clearly I couldn't just buy a chuppah. Oh no, I felt the need to make my life more difficult, so I'm going to sew my own, with help from Sewgeeky, of course. A month or so ago, we took a trip to Thai Silks in Los Altos and found some gorgeous material. The chuppah will have two layers. The bottom will be made of this shimmery orange/red silk, and will have tone-on-tone embroidery of vines and leaves on it. The top will be a sheer white fabric and will have our names embroidered on it in white thread. (Yes, we do plan on embroidering everything we can get our hands on, thank you.) The sheer layer will be not hang over the poles, and will only be attached to the silk layer at the four corners, which will hopefully create the effect of the sheer fabric floating above the silk. Hopefully.
For those who are now wondering what the heck a chuppah is, here's a picture of one. The ceremony is performed underneath it. The one in the picture is built to be free-standing, but we'll have people holding on to the poles. I thought this seemed like a better idea than having to worry about whether a strong breeze might blow the thing over onto our heads. The one in the picture also doesn't have a border -- it's just a piece of cloth hung between four poles. The one we're making will have a border that will go over the outside of poles. It won't be very wide, probably about 6 inches or so.
I am, of course, scared of cutting into my beautiful silk, so I thought it wise to buy some really ugly $0.88 per yard fabric to practice on. Which I did, and I'm going to do another refinement of the pattern with the practice material before I attach the silk. I can hear you asking yourself how difficult the pattern can be, it's just a square. This would be true if they sold silk in bolts five and a half feet wide, which they don't. So I'm attempting to piece the square together in a clever and interesting way, which lead to me doing actual geometry for the first time in about five years and also getting totally confused when cutting out the practice fabric. So the plan is to make a few modifications to the pattern, try cutting it out of the ugly fabric again, and assuming I don't screw it up, move on to the silk. The weird thing about the silk is that you don't cut it, you tear it. It freaked me out when the lady at Thai Silks just grabbed the fabric and started ripping after she measured out what I ordered, but the weave is such that it rips very easily in a straight line.
Next time... Ryan vs. the silk!