Thursday 3 September 2015

Hen Night

Sooo. A DIY hen night. There will be 2 crafts involved in that evening: staying awake long enough for the children to go to bed and being able to mix cocktails. That's right, while the men go out to party us women will stay at home and have a girly night in.

The idea is as simple as it is practical - we will get all the cheesy movies out that we'd never normally get to watch, put on some gruesome face masks, paint nails and drink home-made cocktails.

I've spent the last 3 days putting together a list of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic cocktails, making a shopping list, using a major supermarket chain to work out the estimated price and I am now slowly going around different shops to put together all the items at a reasonable cost. Any leftovers from the budget (at the moment around £250) can be used towards face mask ingredients and morning-after breakfast.

I'd recommend to everyone to learn the basics of EXCEL. Not only is it a brilliant program to organise lists, but it has also helped me keep track of our wedding budget and now the hen budget. You really don't need to be a genius to work it, after all, I've managed. The two price columns add up the cost of all the items (estimated and actual) for me and the box to the right of the table helps me keep track of how much money I have saved from the estimate. The box stays green so long as money is saved and goes red if I go over budget. Simple, really, and I've done something similar for the wedding, with the sheet counting up all our savings and deducting every bill from it.

As you may guess from the list, our cocktails include, among others, Pina Colada, Mojito, White Russian, Cuba Libre, Long Island Iced Tea as well as non-alcoholic Fireside Flamer, Cranberry Cutie and Chocolate Cocktail. My cocktail-mixing days have been a while, but I am sure you can't unlearn these things.

Wednesday 2 September 2015

Tears, Tantrums and T'dress (sorry)

Just updated the post to show what the dress really looks like. The previous picture was awful, sorry.

Every day is dressmaking day, even though it still doesn't seem like much has got done. Draping the first bit was easy enough - all I had to do was find a shape that suited the dress and that I halfway liked.

Draping the second side was harder as I wanted to make sure that the patterns matched up completely.

Both parts were trimmed at the bottom, leaving a rather large margin to avoid fraying ruining the dress before the big day.

This then left the question of what to do next. The idea was to make the rest of the corset quite fitted, with a single layer of fabric being shaped around the belly and back bit. Oh, how mistaken I was. The fact that the material is gathered underneath the breasts has meant that it does look a little untidy under there, which means that any straightforward fabric layer would have shown the extent of the problem and in the trial I was close to tears and just buying a damn dress again.

However, I then chose to layer the fabric across the first 4 sets of bones on the corset (the affected part) and used a slip stitch to fasten the upper layer to the breast draping.
I have to say, I am quite happy with the result. The additional layers have taken the focus off the middle and onto the belly. Whether I would really like to show my belly off is an entirely different question, of course.
Any fabric underneath the last layer will now become skirt as this is the height my hips start at and dresses that shape appear to suit me.

So now it's onto the sides and back. Hopefully this means that by the end of the week the majority of the dress will be finished.

A friend has helped me choose some jewellery to take apart and use to cover up the shoulders and midriff area to hide any less than professional stitching. I am also using some of the newly-gained beads in a second tiara and potentially some earrings, so that everything will appear to match up after all.