Abigail's Wedding Hair Pins

I dabble in bead embroidery when it's needed for specific pieces. In these cases I'm usually matching or complimenting some other design.  For example the bead embroidered Tiara piece that I created for Helen a few years ago. When some of my dear friends announce that they are getting married I offer to bead something for them for their wedding outfit if it calls for it. Not everyone takes me up on it, and if I don't think I can do what they want I let them know. 

Detail photo I was working off of from Abigail

Abigail asked if it was possible to do some beadwork for her hair that went with her dress. She sent me plenty of photos of the beadwork on her dress and sizes of beads and sequins to work with. I wasn't sure I could do it since I've never worked with sequins before but I started researching and playing. As I went down the sequin rabbit-hole I found this fabulous website to purchase sequins. 

I stitched a few pieces at a time on one piece of satin

I compiled white, off white and silver beads from my stash along with ordering a few different sequins that I thought would hopefully work. I mailed the sequin samples to Abigail to compare to her dress...whites and the various finishes are so hard to photograph and guess at! Once I had enough information and color options I started stitching. 

I always think that I don't like bead embroidery but these were super-fun. I was really amazed at how well they clustered together in Abigail's hair for her wedding. Her hair dresser did an amazing job at making the ones she chose to use look like they were all one piece. Her hair dresser had requested I put them on 2 inch U-pins which I ordered from Amazon. 

Abigail's Wedding Hair!

We had such a great time at all of the wedding festivities and getting to catch up with friends old and new. I'm always honored to have something that I handmade as part of a friend's wedding. Thank you for including us and congrats Abigail and Juan!

Lastly, I loved photographing these. I wished I had a macro lens to really get better detail of the sequins and beads together.  I'm am by no means a professional photographer but I took a lot of photos as close as I could get.  The shapes drew me in. So this blog post has extra photos!

Our Punk Themed Wedding

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

I haven't been blogging because we've been getting ready for our wedding, celebrating, enjoying a honeymoon and then it just wasn't a priority. I'm not the biggest fan of being on my computer/phone/social media when I'm at home. So now I'm backlogged.  I'll start at the exciting part of my year and then bounce around my summer/fall timeline in future blogs. 

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

We got married!

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

I could go on and on about our story and how I never, ever thought I'd meet someone or be in a healthy relationship that was just...easy to be together. After almost 6 years I still look forward to seeing Bryan every day and miss him when we are apart. Life is cozy and there's an ease at home that makes our day to day life fun.

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Looking back on the day, the best part of the wedding for me was our ceremony. It was us, in the space in that we have worked on together in our back yard, at our home.  It was deeply personal. My brother played guitar and keyboard for our "punk" themed ceremony (Talking Heads, Bad Religion, Ben Folds....).  Metro Melik officiated for us and not only is he the biggest promoter of Lansing that I know, he was also our bartender the first time we went out. Our chairs were laid out in ska-checker-style, black and white. The backdrop was the door privacy fence that I'm so proud of.  We also put together a center arbor with 2 glass doors in our purple wedding color and an old exterior door frame with checkered accents.

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

It rained, down poured, beforehand, but cleared for the ceremony. It was perfect. We put our wedding together somewhat quickly (as weddings go) this year. We knew there'd be bumps along the way, then inertia just took over in September. We decided to keep it small and simple. I'm glad our guest list was short because I was overwhelmed with the amount of people we did have. There was so much joy and love and hugs and excitement. 

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Bryan and I hadn't discussed it, but we knew before we even talked about getting married that this relationship was permanent and marriage or not, we were together.  It was really cool seeing everyone excited that we decided to make it official.

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

The reception was at The Avenue where we met. It was so awesome of Ruckus Ramen to cater, Dani, Colleen, Jimmy and everyone who worked to put this together for us. Again, SO we had much love and warmth from everyone who helped with and attended our wedding.

Thank you Alex (from Mirabella Salon) and his colleage Megan for our wedding hairstyles! 

Our phenomenal flower arrangements we created by Britt at Where the Wild Things Bloom:

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Drizzle Cakes and Bakes worked in the most beautiful "dark and moody" cake and cupcakes for us. Britt was able to get our flowers and monkeytail fiddleheads to Jill for the cake. Everything that she bakes is absolutely delicious!

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

We spent time picking out our first dance song together. We don't have "a song", we have a genre.  I've loved ska music since I was a teen and never stopped following my favoirte bands even as their shows got smaller. Bryan brought up ska music while we chatted even before our first night out together. So we found the slower ska song, a classic by Madness, "It Must Be Love."  Speaking of music, thank you Mike, the DJ at The Avenue for mixing in some classic favorite with tons of ska-punk music. It was like my personal playlists were going all night.

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

There are so many great photos that Jena got I just wanted to post a few of my favorites here. Thank you to everyone who was part of our special day!

Photo by Jena Hovey of McShane Photography

#MyBeadingYear How it's Going

At the beginning of this year I made sure to talk about how I try to make very loose plans and goals because I'm so hard on myself when I don't finish things "in time" or "fast enough" so I only hoped to get my current weaving off the loom this year, maybe finished. 

How's that going? 

I stitch a little on the beaded netting which will be the weaving's edge (this portion of the project sits in a 9mm case by the couch for evenings in front of the TV). I haven't been weaving a whole lot since it's been getting nice enough to work outside but I did notice that I'm just past half-way on "Is There a Thing to Which Brings Us Less Joy Yet We Devote More Time."  I've been feeling like I may be playing "yarn chicken" but at the end I'm sure I'll have enough rayon in the colors I had dyed.  Trying to match a dye years later never really works and I designed this so that the "Wi-Fi" pick-up design is repeated on the beginning and ending of the piece.

I'm also beading some ideas for wedding stuff. Lets face it, wedding planning if going to be the big part of my summer which will force me to finish the garage, reroof the shed, cleanup and add-to the door fence and get our gardens under control. My beading has turned to jewelry with spikes and leopard print for bridesmaid ideas; fishnet is also becoming more prominent in my styling process.

I am falling madly in love with the spikes that Swarovski offers. The bangles and dress details are really giving me that dressy-punk look that we're looking for.

So wish me luck on playing yarn chicken this year and getting all the beading done for our upcoming nuptials!

Wedding Dress Bead Embroidery Details

Doing the beadwork on Katie's wedding dress has been my beading focus over the past 2 and a half months. You've probably noticed photos of it in progress on my Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.  I'm really really happy about how the embroidered pieces turned out. Above is the focal pieces on the empire waist. (3 pieces all together).

The front of one shoulder.

The front of the other shoulder.

The back piece.

The back and should strands made me the most nervous, bead stringing isn't my forte.  Luckily Katie and her mom came over one afternoon and strung beads for 4 hours or so, which helped a lot.  Above isn't the greatest photo of the back, however, when the photos started coming through on Facebook yesterday evening, I was SO happy with how lovely the back and should strands turned out.

There was a lot of pinning and re-pinning.

At first I only made the shoulder pieces 4 inches long, 

I had to add another 2 inches to each side.

Should piece in progress.

Katie said she'd share some of the real photos of her in the dress with me, so more to come on the final look of the piece.  I wanted to get the details up before I forgot!

Shannon's Wedding Bracelet

Every once in a while I get to do a wedding piece.  I have done veils, hair combs and the occasional bracelet.  This past weekend my brother in law got married and I was fortunate enough to get to make a bracelet for his bride, Shannon.  

(in the process of working on it)

Shannon's mom had handed over her own wedding dress for Shannon to use however she wanted to for her wedding.  I was pretty nervous to start cutting into someone else's wedding dress, but it got easier after we chopped an arm off.  

We decided that the best piece of lace for the bracelet was the point that came around the wrist and pointed down the hand.  In order to make it continue to lay flat, I brought a string of beads from the point and into a ring around her middle finger.  Shannon helped pick out seed bead accents that went along with her wedding dress.  This bracelet had a snap closure and we used one of the little fabric buttons from the back of her mom's dress as a detail over the closure.  All of the crystal and pearl accents came off of her mom's tiara veil.

I also had a chance to snap a picture of her shoes after she switched into flip flops at the wedding.  They're a little dirty from running around the yard taking photos and the ceremony, it reminds me of how trashed my shoes at my own wedding got!  I had mentioned that we were working on shoes together in this previous post.  The lace on her shoes is also from her mother's wedding dress.