Flower girls

I realized I never did show proper pictures of my nieces in the flower girl dresses I'd made them. The girls wore Oliver + S dresses that I made from turquoise silk taffeta (Kate) and navy blue silk taffeta (Ana), along with yellow rose flower crowns and carried (more like twirled and bounced around (; ) pomanders that I'd made.

The dress pattern is The School Photo Dress from Oliver + S. Definitely one of my favorite patterns! If you ever make it, it has one of the most ingenious ways to incorporate an invisible zipper, a collar, and a lining. I've followed this method of assembly for a few other dress patterns now since it works so nicely!!

pictures by Stephen DeVries

The girls LOVED the flower crowns. They were definitely the big hit with them. All the time I'd spent picking out cute blue hair bows on etsy.... they just wanted the crowns on!

The dresses were actually very easy to sew, but I'd made this pattern a couple times before. I still adore the little kangaroo pocket it has, although the girls were busy with the flowers and didn't end up using the pockets much that day. We had matching white cardigans and little lacy white socks for them that I found on sale on jcrew.com. And adorable little black maryjanes. I definitely had a lot of fun picking out their little outfits. It made the day really enjoyable to have the munchkins around. They were interested in what was going on, got really into dancing after dinner, and stormed the reception in their PJs before going home, which was just too cute.

I'm thinking that Christmas dresses this year might be white silk School Photo dresses. Maybe with some red piping across the front yoke seam?

weddings, earthquakes, and other stuff

I did not finish a dress to wear to my cousin's wedding. Instead I wore a Tahari dress and took a bunch of pictures of family. Can you believe this is only a few of my cousins? We were joking all weekend about how crazy huge our family is.



My parents also celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary the night before my cousin's wedding. Happy Anniversary, mom & dad!



So, did all you East Coasters feel the earthquake this afternoon? I was sitting in our company's cafeteria, eating a late lunch, when I felt the floor and the big wooden table I was at start shaking, and I KNEW what it was. Honestly, it really freaked me out. I was on the 9th floor of a very old brick building in Seattle in the 2001 Nisqually quake (6.9, baby!), and saw the building get trashed around me - broken pipes, air conditioning ducts ripped out of their mounts, collapsed shelves, broken glass, all that fun stuff. My mom called this evening and asked if I had felt the quake, and then asked if I was OK. I had to tell her that I really had hoped to never experience another quake again in my life. This one was pretty tame, though, other than the crazy surge of "oh no not again" it produced in me. ;) In fact, after our building was evacuated, I may have sounded like one of the jaded West Coasters in this NYT article.