Here are some pictures of the wedding and bridesmaid dresses I made in the fall.

Here are some of the things we’ve been up to recently.

This was the inside of the pumpkin when I cut it in half. I love the way you can see three distinct sections.

This is the pumpkin after I baked it.

The pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting were wonderful as usual.

This was my first experience with a spaghetti squash. I will not be giving up pasta for squash, but it was really neat to see how it got its name. It was tasty with our Chicken Parmesan, too.

My wonderful husband carves our pumpkin every year. I think he does a great job!

I made a batch of pepper jelly with jalepeños from our garden.

We dressed up to visit grandparents. I made my costume and the pirate costumes. Colin was Thomas a few years ago and passed the costume down to Eamon since he loves trains.

Oh yeah…and I turned 30!!! Here is the birthday card I got from my husband…a “mock” newspaper/tabloid article. It even includes my name misspelled once, which is a necessity to be real, as anyone in the printing industry knows!

Well, after six weeks and a lot of work, I finished sewing a wedding dress and two bridesmaid dresses. I don’t have pictures from the wedding yet, but I will post them as soon as I can.

What a mess! In order to cut out the wedding dress, I had to completely rearrange the kitchen, push my kitchen table and sewing table together, then drape the rest of the satin in a chair.

For the first fitting, I made a muslin bodice to make sure it was the right size. For the second fitting, I pinned the bodice to the skirt lining.

It took a long time for me to decide how I wanted to arrange the embellishments. I don’t know how many times I moved them around before I figured out just how I wanted them.

These are pictures of the dress before I embellished it.

I took these pictures before the dress was completely finished and I still had some of the embellishments pinned on.

This is with the train pinned up the way it would be bustled for the reception. She planned to tie the sash in a bow to keep it out of the way.

These are pictures of the finished wedding dress.

This is the only picture I have of one of the bridesmaids in her dress. After the picture was made, I still had to hem the bottom and steam it to get all the wrinkles out.

I have been sewing some house dresses for a friend’s mom. There were seven total that I made in all different fabrics. She picked out the fabric and brought it to me so all I had to do was sew them. I enjoy sewing because when I am done, I can look at what I’ve made and see that I’ve accomplished something. In this case it makes me feel really good because I’ve helped someone have clothes to wear that she really appreciates because it is hard for her to find clothes at a store that she likes and that fit her properly. It is a little more nerve-wracking to sew for someone else because I worry about every little detail (and I’m such a perfectionist anyway). So, here are the finished dresses from 2 different patterns. There’s one smock (since there wasn’t enough of that fabric for a dress)…