Live*Lovely at the Designers Downtown Market

The Designer's Downtown Market was great! I had a really fun time setting up and seeing all my dresses get a day in the sun. I'm so thankful to Paul and my mom for all their help too. Paul made some awesome racks for the dresses to hang on and helped with other handyman stuff, and my mom did some last minute sewing for me and also did a great job as a saleslady with me in the booth. We had several sales and got to talk to a lot of people about future custom orders. It was super!

Designers Downtown Market

The Live Lovely Dress Shop will soon go live! I'm frantically getting ready for my first craft show. I'll have a booth at the Designers Downtown market this weekend and I'm having so much fun putting it all together. Once it's all over I'll post some pictures of everything. But I've already had one really nice fellow artist get in touch about ordering a dress after she saw me on the DDM website. Fun! I think it will be great to take all this sewing and posting and ordering to a more personal level. Wish me luck!

pretty designs

Look at the pretty design I had left over after cutting out my facings the other day. I love kind of circular, symmetric designs. This especially applies to pretty sunburst-y things like these gorgeous sparkly underpass decorations I saw when I was in DC last weekend. So pretty and perfect for the space.

Birthday dress!

So I put off making that other garden dress until tomorrow and instead made one for me, because . . . it's my birthday! I made a new pattern which I almost goofed up. Who'd have thunk you needed so much allowance for pin tucks? But I got it fixed well enough and I think I know how to change the pattern for the shop now. This will be the weekend dress I believe. What do you think of it?

A garden dress waiting to be born

Here's what I'll be working on tomorrow! Check my etsy shop for the finished product: livelovelydressshop.etsy.com

Anniversary no. 2

What a fun anniversary we had yesterday. I am so blessed to be with my fun, funny, sweet and super husband. Here are some snapshots of the day:


We picked strawberries at a berry farm a little ways out into the country. It was a gorgeous day!


Some of Paul's grandmother's doilies my mother-in-law sent us.


The front of the card my mom sent. So pretty and so true. It was a beautiful day!

Froggy

Look who Paul found living in the hole Lucie dug near the compost bin! Our back yard is so exciting these days. What was the name of that old kids magazine? My Big Backyard? Between the garden, the bridge over the creek(drainage easement), the compost bin, the raspberries ripening, and now the froggy, my backyard feels very big indeed even if it is technically kind of little.

Morning sewing

I am such a morning person. It's definitely the happiest and most productive time of the day for me. So I love it when I can start out doing something I really love. Today was a sewing day! Here's what greeted me after breakfast and a beautiful walk with Lucie.


The dress came out great too. I'll post it this evening sometime. But until then there's lots of lovely living to be done: fold clothes, grocery store, wash dishes including nasty tupperware that lay forgotten at work for waaay too long. It was nice to have such a sunny start to the day though!

the Live*Lovely Dress Shop

So I have a new hobby. I really have to give credit to Mike for inspiring me to pick a couple of hobbies to focus on this year. It was a great idea and has helped me know what to do when I have a little time on my hands. Thanks Mike! I picked piano and sewing. I have really been enjoying playing the piano. But I have gotten a little out of control with the sewing. I started doing some projects from a book I had, but there were no dresses in the book and that is what I had really wanted to make from the beginning. So I cut some of the pieces up and made some new pieces of my own and made a couple of dresses. They came out great! Then the wheels started turning in my head. A year or so ago I started dreaming of opening up a little boutique with cute, feminine and casual clothes for everyday life. I thought, and still think, that there is a lack of supply in that category. Everything is trying to be trendy, sexy, and flashy, which is ok in its place. But most of the time I think women are just trying to get their stuff done and feeling bad because you can't wear a sexy top to the grocery store, but you look a little shlumpy in a t-shirt and sweats. I wanted to sell clothes that filled that gap. But I sort of let the idea go when I realized that finding inventory for a store like that would be reaaaaally tough. Flash forward to me discovering I am able to sew cute and simple dresses myself. Tada . . . the live*lovely dress shop was born. Check it out at livelovelydressshop.etsy.com.