Happy Halloween!

...okay, it's not Halloween. But quelle merveille is about to start making (drumroll please) COSTUMES!

It all started with our mom. She texted and asked for imaginative ideas on how to dress for homecoming (to clear this up, mom is not a high schooler. That would be weird. She works at a school who was celebrating homecoming [ahh! flashback!] and the next day was "character day.'). She had mentioned Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz a few times, so I thought, "that couldn't be hard to make real quick!" and googled it:

I'm not gonna lie, I don't remember it looking quite like this. At least, that's not how I pictured her in my head. In any case, I panicked for a few seconds, because let's face it: that's not a sew-in-a-few-hours, no-fittings type of outfit. So, I quit panicking and got to thinking. Without a measurement, I did a lot of guessing (I see my mom a lot!) and decided to go with straps instead of the full-on top, attached to a skirt. I searched my rather extensive array of fabrics and found one that was blue (I didn't have enough checkered fabric to make the skirt). I got started, and low and behold, finished it!

And yes, we are fans of "upcycling." That's a curtain. ANYWAY, she apparently got several compliments and, being the loving mother she is, did a little advertising for us. I just got finished making a poster for her to hang up at her school advertising Halloween costumes. Should be interesting, but we're trying to look at is as eccentric clothing rather than costumes ;)

Yeah, if you know anything about fashion or read magazines ever, that's a Coach ad. Totally ripped them off, but I'm thinking it wont affect their revenues ;) AND FYI: I did this by editing a photo on my iMac with whatever comes on it stock... so if you're a graphic-type, don't hate. Buy me Illustrator instead ;)

So if you're in the market for a rockin' Halloween costume, shoot us an email for a quote.

As Promised!

Look at this. It's almost too much. Here we are, blogging without apologizing to you!

This wont be too long, just some progress shots of the room-organizing :)

WE'RE STILL HERE!

I know, just know, that you have all been on the edge of your seat wondering where we have been in the past few weeks, er, months...

Don't worry, we haven't died or even been injured (minus the occasional/often pinprick). We have been sewing our hearts out, whatever that means, this whole time. And thinking of YOU!

Since it's been so long, and I can just sense that you want to know every single DETAIL of what's been going on, this might be a kind of... long... post. But I will put a lot of pictures up to make it worth it, all the way until the end!

Let's see... Since we last posted, it would appear we were working on bridesmaid's dresses. Not surprising, since I'm pretty sure that's all we did for several months. Maybe years... So a few weeks ago, the bride and groom got married with fully clothed bridesmaids! Yay! When all the pictures come in, I'll be sure to get permission and stick some on here of the whole thing, since  nobody could deny a good look at a few wedding pictures (i.e. dresses). I did manage to get some of the dresses though, so feast your eyes on our toils:

 A and her husband, James in the dress she made

Jess and our brother, in the dress she made (that hem was stuck up in the dress for the entire wedding, and we had no idea until the pictures came in!)

Dana and the groom's brother, in the dress A made

Sierra and the bride's brother-in-law, in the dress Jess made

And last but not least, the greatest picture of all time:

Jess and A, relaxing after the wedding...

So that was our big project of the century. Or at least of the year, I'd say. When we got done with it, I'm pretty sure angels and birds sang because we were so glad that we did it and that it was over. We shall furthermore never use that fabric again. Except we have several yards left so we'll have to... Eh.

So a few days after the wedding, we checked our calendar and realized we had what they call a "Craftsman on the Porch" demo at our local Community House. In a week. Yikes!
We wanted to do something special for the public, and we knew the crowds would be minimal since our little tourist-y town is winding down until ski season, so we decided on a "Recycled Clothes" type of demo. We set about cutting out pieces of our extra fabric so that we could show people how to recycle their clothes like we do. We also hoped there would be a lot of kids so we could convince them that sewing is cool (we did not get that memo until we were teenagers).

We managed to get everything ready, and luckily for us, there were a few little girls and a few older women (I guarantee you they thought we were insane) there and it was just enough to get the word out and have some fun. Our dad (who, incidentally, took the pictures of the wedding and is an amazing artist and photographer) took some pics for us, so, yet again, feast your eyes on our toils:

A explaining the project to our diverse crowd :)

Jess, ironically showing people the rotary cutter and how to use it safely...

The first one to be done! She was sweet and modeled for us :)

Admirers. We brought some examples of what we've recycled.

So that was a few days ago, and we've successfully recovered from everything (I think). Now the big project is to help our sewing room recover. People have been SO generous, giving us their extra clothes, their relatives' extra clothes, extra fabrics, remnants, etc. It's been awesome. However, in all the rush, not everything got put away properly. Or even at all... So we've been working on putting everything in its place (and saying, "hey! I forgot we had that! So cool!"). I conveniently and (mostly) purposefully did NOT take "before" pictures... I'm not that comfortable with your love and support, or my intense humanity. But I took a few progress shots with my iPhone:

Figuring out a place and system for it all...

Getting there. Ignore the scraps on the floor. And again, thanks everybody for all of the fabrics!! Look at it!

I believe this is about 99% of the fabric and clothes, all neatly organized.

So, as you can see, it's getting there. I'm not about to show you the rest of the room, because it is NOT getting there.  But in time, it will. We're working on it tomorrow as well, and I'll try to take some more progress pictures.

Well, that's almost it, I think. Can you believe you've almost made it to the end of this post?! I congratulate you. I promise we will start updating the Etsy site, since that's even more neglected than the blog, and I will most definitely post about it when we do. Also, we'll update you when and if we EVER get back to the poor store that we were going to put skirts in. With all the hubbub, we haven't gotten back to her and she probably forgot about us! o.O

Okie dokie, quelle merveille out.

Uh oh!

I'm VERY intimidated to write this, because it's been so long that it has to be amazing to prove to you all we had great excuses for not writing... which we did! (with a LITTLE relaxing thrown in) This is A.

First of all, we recently started making those bridesmaids dresses we keep talking about. They're turning out really well, but I need to go back a bit on mine... The seams are a bit crooked, and there will of course be wedding pictures, so they have to be perfect. I'm very proud of the design, though!

Also, I'd better not gain ANY weight before the wedding! I guess it'll be a good incentive to work out and cut back on dessert... Still, I'm not too excited about it.

 
Jessi's is amazing, I'm sure partly because she watched me make a few mistakes on mine and be forced to fix them. Ha! We have four dresses to get done, two for ourselves, so of course we're finishing ours first =)

It's all coming together =)

Incidently, I found a picture of the soon-to-be-married couple... when they were in my wedding!

We've been trying to get those skirts done too, but with the bridesmaids dresses and their very strict deadline, we've only made a few more. I'm thinking about stealing one for me...

The tags came in! We put them in all our clothes, and they look gooooood.

So anyway, our excuses include mostly bridesmaids dresses, plus tags, skirts, cute babies, 4th of July parade in the fire truck...

We've missed you guys! We'll be checking in again soon... really!

Pandora!

And when I say that, I mean that the inspiration necessary for me to write a post is compliments of Pandora. This is A, by the way!

It's been busy. We went to a wedding, but not the one we're making bridesmaids' dresses for; no, for this wedding we made part of the centerpieces! There are no pictures I can find, but they were basically just satin napkins with lacy ribbon-ed edges to go under these:

The wedding was so pretty, as was our lovely sister-in-law! When pictures come in, maybe we'll post some, just for fun :) We all got a stomach bug on the trip, but we had fun, too.

But back to quelle merveille... We were asked to make more skirts like this one, which a store in Taos will carry for a month or two on commission to see how it goes. Yay!

Okay, I know this sounds like a lame excuse, but Gideon woke up and looks cuddly. =) See ya!

Good Heavens!

It's been waaayyyy too long, eh? We've been doing some of this...

... Would you look at that MESS?! We've switched sewing rooms and, well... it's slow going! We work among the wreckage.

We've been actually working on stuff, too! Check it...

Almost there...

And we've been FINISHING stuff, too!

side ruching

That particular dress was sold to a friend (shout out to Sabra :)) but this next one is still up for grabs...

Note the rocking frays.


Sooo we've been doing all of that, give us a pat on the back! However, it has slowed down a lot, hence the lack of posts. We've really mostly been doing things involving this:

Hard to resist, I know.

OH! And the article that we talked about (at least, I think we did...?) Anyway, it came out! Those of you in the area, pick up the Spring 2011 Land and Home. And those of you NOT in the area... that sucks, but if you're super nice, I might be convinced to post a copy of it... someday.

So basically, check out our etsy because it has a ton of new things on it, with more coming SOON, and sincere apologies for the, like, two or three week (?!) interval between posts!

Life Continues

We got some bad news this week (well, last week if we had checked our email...)
The store that was going to carry our things had a change of heart. Long story, not an interesting one, but luckily it didn't sound like she didn't like US or OUR STUFF, just going in a different direction.

Anywho... (incidentally I really kind of hate that word!)

That same day I got an email from another place in Taos (granted the emails were written a few days apart but, again, we're bad email-checkers!) and we happened to be going that way anyway, so we stopped by. She seems interested and has even done some designing, sewing, etc. which is nice. We found out that there are more people in this area that design/sew/etc like we do, which is really nice to hear. So we'll be meeting with her in the next few days/weeks/however long it takes. Exciting!

We have a few more people/places/ideas to try out, we figure we'll try anything just as long as it works. We really need to get another photo shoot going, so if you know somebody who will model/photograph/help, let us know! All the creative genius and beauty we can get! ;)

So we've still been working, this is the picture of a dress I'm working on out of a jersey knit (basically like t-shirt material)... excuse my messy couch and Lucy in the background ;)

 In this particular picture, it's just pinned on. Right now it's mostly done, a few finishing touches need to be done, but it's on its way. The hem will be slanted and there's ruching on that right side (the mannequin's left). When it's done I'll get a picture... I'm due to take pictures of a lot of things!

Anyways, there's the best update I could muster! :)