The Wedding Shrug

 

When my daughter got engaged in June, and as we were planning the wedding we were having one of the hottest summers on record. She picked out her "dream" dress with lace, and a beautiful strapless sweetheart neckline.   But the date of the wedding was October 20, I kept thinking that her beautiful strapless dress might be  a problem when the weather cooled down in October.  So I began researching and trying to find a pattern for a shrug that would have a beautiful lace design, and not cover up her beautiful dress.

I ended up putting together a pattern for stockings (Vogue magazine Spring/summer 2009) with a stockinette knit back, and then added a knitted lace edging at the sleeve and along the bottom of the back.  The yarn I used was Blue Skies Alpaca and Silk that I got at my LYS.  I was guessing that the color would work with the color of the dress (Ivory), as the dress didn't come in until late September.  Luckily, the color was perfect.  I also added pearl beads randomly throughout the knitted shrug to tie it in with her dress and the overall styling for the wedding.

 

It took a couple of restarts to get the sizing of the lace and sleeves right.  I was trying to make the shrug as a surprise for Kelly which meant I couldn't try it on her.  So it was mostly knitted by looking at some of her sweaters and crossing my fingers :>).  I ended up giving it to her 3 weeks or so before the wedding and did have to do some alterations to sleeve length, but otherwise it fit really well.  Whew!

 

 

Considering the temperatures ended up barely reaching 50 degrees that day, I think she was so glad to have the shrug.  And as you can see in the pictures it added some warmth for her arms and shoulders without covering up any of her dress.

 

 

 

And can I just say Kelly and Doug are so cute together.  The wedding ceremony was outdoors in a beautiful meadow surrounded by trees, and the reception was in a barn on the same property.  The wedding day was amazing.  And I have to thank the amazing photographers.  The first 3 pictures are by my friend Rissa, the rest of the photos are by Toni Price Photography.  Toni and Rissa did an amazing job.

 

And yes, we had quilts draped on some of the chairs in case guests were cold. 

 

Thanks for stopping by, Sylvia

 

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Sweet Favors

 

We have the favors done for the wedding guests.  They are small jars of honey.  The wedding is being held at an orchard and they produce honey, so we used their honey to make up these cute thank you gifts.

 

 

We started with huge 5 lb jars of honey!!  Oh my, the aroma of the honey was amazing and that beautiful amber color.  Kelly's fiance had been eyeing the honey since we had brought it home, and she had to keep warning him to stay out of it.  We ended up having this much left over so he will finally get to enjoy some of the honey.

 

 

We measured out the amount for each jar from a big bowl. 

 

 

 

Carefully filling and sealing each of the jars.  Then we added burlap covers on top.  This proved to be much more difficult than we imagined because the burlap was so stiff that it kept popping off the slippery lid!  We finally got a system with rubberbands worked out and then added the twine and label.  BTW, Kelly's sister Alyssa made all of the little favor tags.  She is really good at doing the computer layouts for all of our signs and tags.

 

Kelly's Dad even got into the project, helping with the rubberbands and twine.  He did not understand however why on earth the jars needed burlap covers on the lids Ha! Ha!

 

Overall, we are very happy with how they turned out.  We are down to 10 days till the wedding, and really stressing about the weather.  Hopefully it will warm up a bit.  Only a high of 50 today!

 

Thanks for visiting, hope you have a great day!

Wedding Stuff - Burlap Runners

As I have mentioned, our daughter is getting married and we are now down to 3 weeks!!!  So lots of wedding projects are going on.  The wedding will be an outdoor ceremony (all good thoughts for great weather on Oct. 20 is appreciated), and the reception will be in a barn.  The barn is at a local orchard so we are hoping for a beautiful fall day with the trees all in beautiful shades of red and gold.  The trees have started to turn colors around here due to the recent cold snap.  We are really hoping for an Indian summer kind of a day with beautiful sunshine.

Anyway one of the projects we did last week was to make burlap runners that will go down the center of the tables.  We are doing rectangular tables that are set up boarding house style, so the runners are LONG.  We started with 10 yards of burlap which I cut into thirds lengthwise, and then started serging and serging...  it was time consuming but so rewarding.

 Yeah, I know - LOTS of burlap!  We then added a beautiful lace edging that we found at Joann Fabrics, in an off white color.

 

 

We used an acetate stencil my other daughter Alyssa custom made for Kelly with Kelly and Doug's initials, and stenciled with brown craft paint onto the burlap at each end of all the runners.  It was a bit fiddly getting everything lined up just right but once we had the process figured out we were on a roll.  And due to some starbucks and good music, we were up till 1:00 am working on these, we were determined to get them all done.

 

 

 

The runner with the stenciling complete.  We loved how the brown paint and stencil design looks with the bulap and lace.  Sorry about the hot pink drop cloth, it was the only plastic bag we could come up with to use under the burlap.  We found otherwise the paint would go through the loose weave of the burlap and get all over my table.

 

And this is what the runner looks like all completed.  Yes we had these layed out all over the studio to let them dry.  OK, one more project we can cross off Kelly's wedding to do list!