Something Old, Something New

From the day Tommy asked me to marry him, I knew what type of dress I wanted.  After looking through a few bridal magazines, I found the dress for me.  I instantly fell in love with it and tore the picture out of the magazine. I carried that picture around for months and when it came time to shop for wedding dresses, I show the tattered picture to the bridal consultant and said "This is the dress I want".  She did the whole "well you have to try on a number of dresses because you won't necessarily like dresses once you try them on" ...blah blah blah!   I KNEW that would be my dress and there was no way ANYONE was going to talk me out of it!

Here we are almost 11 years after we got married and I fell in love with my wedding dress all over again ... this time for a different reason.  My daughter Averi is being baptized next weekend and I needed to buy her a gown for it.  After looking at dresses, I decided that I was going to re-purpose my wedding dress into a baptismal gown for Averi.  I took my favorite aspect of my dress (the back/train) and made it into a gown for Averi.  After several attempts at using a pattern to create her gown (I can't follow a pattern if my life depended on it!)  I decided to wing it and create my own design.  The anxiety and stress that came from the thought of cutting up my wedding gown almost made me stop.  I thought about it and decided that I would never again be wearing my gown, I love it so much and what a better way to incorporate the love between Tommy & I into Averi's special day.... I did it, I took the scissors to my wedding gown.  

I couldn't be happier with how Averi's gown turned out!!  I'm far from being a professional seamstress (I would actually only consider myself a very novice sewer)  but here's the final product.  

Next on the agenda was a headband for Averi's big day.  I looked online to check out my options and I was going to buy one ... after all, the dress took me quite a while to make so I was going to just buy her headband.  I couldn't find what I wanted.  I was looking for simple, all white, and pretty.  I love the rosettes that I see on headbands but never knew how to make them and all the ones I found were colored.  Off to youtube I went to find a tutorial on making roses.  It was actually quite easy.  These roses are made using the material from my wedding gown as well.  

I probably could have paid a seamstress to make my wedding gown into Averi's baptismal gown and had it look better, but I'm quite proud of what I came up with.  No amount of money could be paid to a seamstress to put the love that I have put into making Averi's gown & headband.  She has been such a blessing to our lives and at times it still surreal to believe that she's actually here.  When I found out that she was a girl the first thing I said to Tommy was "I don't know how to be a girl Mom" ..... looks like I've figured it out.  Love you bunches and bunches Averi Mae Britton