How's this for wonderfully sweet?

For the past few months, I've been searching for my wedding dress (yay!). There will be a lot of dancing at our fabulous party, so I've been trying to find a great dress to dance in. Since I also have a fondness for great vintage swing dance clothes, it seemed like a great idea to try to find a 40s or 50s style dress...and hopefully one that I might be able to wear again for fancy swing dance events again!

But it turns out that there's a bazillion full-length wedding gowns with trains, but not so many that are tea-length. Sigh. I did actually find some gorgeous "short" wedding dresses by a designer named Stephanie James, but I am SO not spending $1700-3000 on a dress (even though I desperately want to!)

I also took a trip up to Chicago late last summer to spend the day dress hunting with my sisters and niece. Although we didn't actually count how many dresses I tried on that day (at least 30) the very last one I put on had some potential. The right length, kinda twirly, not super ridiculously expensive... Definitely the best of the bunch, but still not exactly what I was looking for.

My mom missed out on this little shopping expedition, but we took photos. She had also seen the great 50s style dresses I was longing for, and suggested that she could make my dress for me. I love my mom. She's great. :) We've both spent the last month looking for vintage style patterns, and I went home last weekend so we could decide on a pattern and start shopping for material.

So here's the really wonderfully sweet and sappy part of the story. It turns out my Mom has kept the pattern she used to make her dress 48ish years ago. And after really taking a look at it, it seemed pretty close to the style I want...so we decided to use it as the pattern for my wedding dress. Sweet, eh?

The other really cute part of this story, is that my mother still has the wedding dress she made for herself. Back when I was in junior high, she had decked it out for me to wear in two school musicals...Glinda in the Wizard of Oz and the fairy godmother in Cinderella. This weekend we pulled off all the sequins, puffed sleeves, and alterations. It still makes me smile that my mom let me use her wedding dress for school plays. I love my mom. She's awesome. :)