Dresses!

My sister Shauna came over today to take Bethany and me to pick up our bridesmaids’ dresses at the bridal shop and to take Dominic to get fitted for his ring bearer tuxedo. Here are the dresses!
Mine, obviously, is the larger one (periwinkle), and Bethany’s the smaller (lavender). Shauna’s wedding flower is hydrangeas, and I think these colors will look great with them. We tried on the dresses at the store, and Bethany’s fits really well, although the top will have to be brought up so it won’t be too low-cut. Mine fits great through the hips, but like I expected, it’s enormous on the top. Unfortunately, despite three pregnancies, I still don’t have much in the chest area, sigh… I think it might also need to be shortened – being only five feet tall, dresses are almost always too long on me. The dress is supposed to be tea-length. We’re going back to the bridal shop in March to get the alterations done on the dresses. Dominic got fitted for his tuxedo. He only tried on a jacket, and was measured, but how cute he looked in the little jacket! He’s little for his age, but luckily the smallest size tuxedo and shoes fit him. He'll be wearing a black tux with white shirt, vest, and tie. The men have it easy – it was only $45 for his tux and shoe rental, including alterations, compared to the couple of hundred dollars mine and Bethany’s dresses put me out. And that’s not including alterations, shoes, getting our hair done at the salon for the wedding, etc., etc. When I told my husband this, he said women wouldn’t want to rent a dress or shoes anyway. Maybe.

I’m excited that I finally got my dress, but now the downside is that I realized that the color of the wedding shawl I’m crocheting for Shauna is way off. The shawl is definitely a much lighter blue than the dress. Oh well. I’m still going to finish it and give it to her anyway, because she could wear it for another occasion. Here's me wearing what I have done on the shawl so far. I need to make it a little bigger, so it can tie in the front, and then I'm going to crochet a scalloped border, and weave ivory satin ribbon through the border.

Now I just need to figure out whether Bethany and I should wear pantyhose with the dresses or not. We're both going to be wearing open-toed silver shoes, and I don't know if they would look weird with pantyhose, being open-toed. I also happen to hate, with a capital "H" wearing pantyhose, but then again, my legs are so pale in early spring though. My lucky daughter has a pretty, year-round tan. Pantyhose or no pantyhose, Barack vs. Hillary - too many decisions to make, LOL!In other crocheting news, I had two really nice experiences the other day! I was sitting on the bus the other morning on the way to work, working on my one of my top-secret PIF gifts, and this man, probably in his 30’s or 40’s sitting in the seat opposite mine, said he was watching me crochet, and was amazed at how fast I was crocheting. Now, I know I’m not fast, but I guess to a non-crocheted it looked that way. He asked me what I was making, and asked what other kinds of things I crochet. That was nice to see a man taking interest in crochet.

The other nice thing that happened was my coworker, Taylor, wore a scarf I made for her for Christmas to work. I mentioned it to her, and she said she gets so many compliments from other people in our office building whenever she wears that scarf, or one I made her for her birthday. She’s taking some college classes, and she said one of her professor’s crochets or knits, and asked her about her scarf, and thought it was so pretty. That made me feel really good. Taylor said she’ll have to have me make her more scarves in different colors for other holidays. I told her definitely, I’ll gladly take special orders!

I took the kids to the library last week, and checked out this book, “Get Your Crochet On!: Hip Hats and Cool Caps” by Afya Ibomu. When I was looking it through it, I saw a pattern for a crocheted head scarf that just looked like something Taylor would love. I brought the book to work and showed it to her, and she was just so thrilled! She loved the scarf and most all the other hats in the book so much, that she said she’s going to Joann’s this weekend to buy some yarn and a hook so I can teach her how to crochet. I had offered to teach her before, because she had mentioned wanting to learn, but she said was too busy with work and school. After she saw those hats though, she decided she can carve out some time to learn how to crochet. That’s pretty exciting. Hopefully I’ll be a good teacher. We’re going to sit down and work on it one day at lunch time. Taylor was looking at my pictures of my crochet projects on my blog, and she said it looks like I’m totally addicted to crochet. I told her I am, and once she learns how to crochet, she’ll be addicted too!

Bethany has a “Crazy Hat Day” at school every year, I think in the spring (she goes to a Catholic school, so they don’t normally get to wear hats at school), so I’m working on a hat from the book for her. The hat is called “Soldier” (there’s pictures of a few on Ravelry), and it’s just basically a cap with a brim. The bottom is crocheted as a flat piece, then seamed together into a tube, and the top and brim are crocheted onto the tube. I'm going to crochet a flower to attach to the hat too. Here’s what I have done so far:

I’m using Caron Simply Soft Shadows in “Mardi Grey”, and I love how it’s coming out so far! Did I mention that I’m a sucker for self-striping yarns?

Well, I’ll post more pictures of the hat as I get it done. Now, if I could just figure out how to get this Blogger line spacing to stop messing up...