Christening dress

I washed my dress in the washing machine and hung it to dry. I used the Mother-in-laws lace from what I assume is her wedding dress train, as the trim on little GG's Christening dress. I also incorporated the pearls on my wedding dress on the bonnet. The bonnet for some reason didn't fit, but the both turned out just fabulous. As you might of guess the other picture is of little GG and me, her very proud Nana.

Altered wedding dress

Well this blog post is about the Christening dress I made my little grand-daughter GG. My daughter lives in Sheridan, Wy. A beautiful little town about 16,000 people at the base of the Big Horn mountains about 30 miles from the Montana state line. She delivered her 4th baby ( she had three little boys ) by C-section back in September. I went up for the birth and stayed for the month to help out. We were all surprised when she delivered a little girl. Her middle name is my middle name. If I was thinking properly I would of thought to bring up fabric for a Christening dress, but no, I didn't. Sheridan has a wonderful quilt shop and a great yarn shop, but the only fabric for a dress like that would of been Walmart ( nothing that worked ) or ACE Hardware/Ben Franklin ( they did have some nice eyelet ). I was going to get fabric at the ACE store when I got the brilliant idea to have my husband send my wedding dress. My plan was to use the fabric to make the Christening dress. After getting the dress in the mail, I thought about having my son-in-law's Mother also contribute some of her dress. Here is what I had to work with. The long dress is mine and the one piece is the Mother-in-laws.

This second pair of shoes are either leather or man made leather. You can use the same technique. Install the grommets and use awesome long shoe laces. Like I have said it is a little more difficult with the leather shoes, but where there is a will, there is a way. As for making shoes bigger. The shoes I used were sandals, they were a slide on style. I cut the top down the middle added grommets and laced them up. I was able to add at least a half a size by doing that and again they looked so cute.

Shoes

Today I am going to talk about shoes. Wonderful, glorious shoes. I love painting and decorating shoes, but I am not going to talk about that. At least not today. Today I want to address shoes that don't fit. I may have a solution for shoes that are too big or perhaps too small. I found a pair of really cute American fabric canvas boat shoes in a catalog. .At least that is what I call this style. Unfortunately that is not a style that usually fits me, but what the heck. They were so cute. I was hoping that these shoes might be different. When I got them, no luck. They were the right lenght, but TOO big around the width of my foot. So I got busy. I have done this technique before with leather shoes and working on the canvas shoes were much easier to do.

I use metal grommets that I purchase at JoAnns. I get them in the package with the little metal tool you use with a hammer. Decide where on the side of the shoe you would like to have the grommets. Mark them with a pen or chalk. I then use a awl to pierce the fabric. You might need to clean up the fabric hole with a small pair of scissors to enlarge the hole to fit the grommets. Install the grommets. Then lace up with a long shoe lace. They fit me great and I actually think they are cuter than before.

Wig Heads

Here is the latest thing I have been working on. In the last year or so, I have seen several canvas, wig heads decorated with different types of faces. I decided that I wanted some to display my hats on. Unfortunately canvas wig heads are way expensive so I decided to try to paint styrofoam wig heads. I coated the styrofoam wig heads with a product called MagiKote which is suppose to make styrofoam paintable. After two coats of MagiKote, I painted the wig heads the way I wanted, and finished them off with two coats of a clear varnish. I love the results and my hats and fasinators look great displayed on my faces untill I want to wear them. Even my husband was impressed