Sewing a wedding gown... fit for a princess

For about a week now, I have been working on a wedding dress for my friend, Kat P. Last week we went down to the fashion district in LA and picked out all the fabrics she wanted (about 39 yards in total!)

A couple days later I started working on cutting out the pattern for the bustier (adjusting it to match her measurements).

Sewing them together with the boning...

and then finally seeing what it looked like finished. My friend then came to try it on to make sure it fit. I made the adjustments I needed to and then I was off to sewing again...

After finishing the bustier I started working on the lining. Today Kat came over to try everything on. It looks like we are all set for the next step... cutting and sewing the crinoline on the lining.

Right now I only have the bottom layers complete... so you all wont even see the above mentioned steps on her wedding day... the best is yet to come!

... to be continued...

Mrs. Myers vs. Black Widow Spiders...

Mrs. Myers wins again!

(With the help of my husband) It is dead!

Spiders and ants and skunks... oh my!

Things here are pretty busy as usual...babysitting a lot, my husband's job and our various ministries...and recently added to my husband's to do list is pest control. The other day he went over to our friend's place place to pull a dead skunk out from under their house, which must have smelled horrible... decaying skunk... YUCK! I just hope this doesn't happen at our place since we recently found a family of skunks underneath our shed in the back. Hopefully the trauma of my husband spraying them with a garden hose will scare them off for good, but only time will tell.

Before that we had ant infestation issues, but my husband sprayed all places of entry and put some grits right by there ant hill (which apparently makes them gassy, but since ants are unable to pass gas they just blow up), which seems to have worked because the ant population seems to have diminished considerably.


That's all in the back of the house, in the front we have continually crossed paths with some black widows, just the other night my husband reached inside the mailbox to see if there was any mail, and was surprised to find a black widow that had taken up residence in there. My husband sprayed the spider with Mrs. Myers, a non-toxic, lavender scented cleaning solution that killed the ants that had found their way into the house. We are hoping that Mrs. Myers will kill the black widows too. Any other ideas to kill black widow spiders?