Shirt Re-Design

I bought this shirt a month or two ago on clearance, and I've been planning on shortening the sleeves ever since.  I finally got around to it.  The shirt was cute with long sleeves, but I want to wear it now and it's just too dang hot here in SC.  

What it looked like with one long sleeve S,orry, forgot to take the pic before :)

 Both sleeves off!

 I wanted to add ruffles to the sleeves as a hem to match the ruffles down the front of the shirt.  Here's how I did it.

 Iron the long rectangle flat.

 And then I forgot to take pics of the rest.  Ha ha. Sorry.  Basically, I hemmed one side of the rectangle then sewed a basting stitch along the other long side, pulling the thread to ruffle it.  I attached it to either sleeve, and wallah! (how do you spell that?)

 The ruffled sleeve.  Doesn't look perfect, but I like it much better.  I will definitely wear this shirt now.  I'll even let you in on a little secret about myself and my sewing skills (or lack thereof).  Since I'm still pretty new at this, most projects still take me twice as long (or longer) as they should.  For instance, I unpicked my ruffle and re-cut the sleeves after sewing the first one on because I didn't like the way they were shaped.  I re-sewed that ruffle on and proceeded to the next.  Upon finishing, I finally looked at it and realized that I had sewn it on inside-out, with the seam on the outside.  Ugh!  I had to unpick the whole dang thing again.  I make these silly kinds of mistakes all the time in sewing.  But hey, someday I'll understand and get things done right the first time, won't I?  At least that is my hope.

 My wonderful modeling skills.  I apologize that half of my head is cut off.  The first two attempts cut off my entire head, and I was tired of re-positioning the camera.  So this is as good as it gets.

 What do you think?  Much better with the shorter sleeves?  I think so.

Also, don't mind the mismatched plaid shorts. :) That's just what I was wearing the day I finished the shirt.

Navy Submarine Ball

Mike and I attended our first Ball last Saturday.  It commemorated the 111th birthday of the Navy Submarine force.  It was pretty neat, with a dinner, speaker, recognition of retired subs and even a few WWII Navy Veterans.  We had a great time, and it was a lot of fun (and stress) to prepare for :)  Going dress shopping, since I didn't own a single dress that could be counted as formal, was fun but nearly unfruitful.  There was not a single modest dress to be found.  Upon resolving to alter any dress I found, the search continued and I finally settled on this pretty purple one.

 In greater detail

 So, the work began.  I removed the bottom ruffle of the dress and re-hemmed the bottom.
Then, I cut sections of that ruffle and sewed them in as sleeves to the dress!  The last bit to finish was HAND-sewing the piece of material to go over the low v-neck.  That took a long time.  All in all, through my mistakes and experiments to figure out how to get all of this done, I spent about 4 hours altering this dress, all in one day.  I was pretty sick of looking at it by the time I finished :) But, I am very pleased with the outcome.

 Here we are, all dressed up. Mike in his dress whites and me in my new formal dress.  We had a great time.

 I even got to do my hair all fancy.  Wow, it had been a while since I had tried to do anything like this!  And I had about 1 option that I knew how to do as an up-do, so here it is.

 I liked it.  Dressing up was a lot of fun!  I look forward to the future Balls and events when we will get to do this again.  Look, I even got some jewelry(!!), considering I didn't have ANY to wear.

Boone Hall Plantation

We visited one of the local plantations a few weeks ago.  There were about 8 old slave homes on the property, each set up with historical information about the slaves, such as their daily life, religious practices, pursuits of liberty, etc.  It was all very neat to see.

Below is one of the slave cabins.

The plantation house, NOT the original home built on this lot.

We found this beautiful tree on the property, and had to take pictures.  By the way, this location is where the movie, The Notebook, was filmed (among others).  While we were there, a woman was even getting her bridal pictures taken.  The place is beautiful!

They also had a butterfly garden at the plantation, with a few butterflies and many gorgeous flowers. This purple flower was pretty amazing, unlike any other I had ever seen.

After leaving here, we went over to the plantation part where the family still grows fruits and vegetables.  We picked strawberries and blackberries by the pound.  It was a lot of fun and I made some strawberry freezer jam, blackberry syrup, and blackberry pie out of our pickings. Yum :)