As mentioned previously, my friends Dylan and Verena planned their wedding for July 19th in Waimanalo, Hawaii. Dylan grew up in Hawaii, mostly in Waimanalo.

This was the first real destination wedding that I’d attended, in that everyone coming to the wedding really made a vacation of it. All the guests were in rental houses within a few blocks of each other and the wedding site. All the houses were also less than half a block from the beautiful white sand beach. It was a wonderful week.

In honor of the fact they were getting married in Hawaii, I had worked feverishly during the weeks prior to make my dress and a shirt for Craig to wear out of Hawaiian print fabric I had bought years ago and recently discovered. You can see that they both turned out just fine:

The entire ceremony was beautiful, and Verena’s dress was one of the most gorgeous wedding dresses I have ever seen, and caused her to look like a mermaid leaving the ocean to join Dylan on the beach.

Yonna and I had also made skirts for the trip through our “Cute Skirt” class at Cool Cottons. The skirts we made in class were sized all wrong so we bought more material and spent another weekend working on new skirts. During our second attempt we decided to make a third skirt for Monica both because we figured she’d enjoy a skirt at the beach, and because we found that there were three variations of the same pattern available. We had to guess on the size for Monica’s, but luckily this time around all the skirts fit.

We all wore our skirts the day we drove to the north shore and stopped at Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck in Kahuku for lunch. Unfortunately, I only have two pictures of the three of us in our skirts and in both the skirts look fine, but the three of us all look a little funny.

It was a wonderful week. I met a lot of great people, ate shave ice, spent time on the beach, kayaked through the tradewinds and got to spend a full week with a six to seven week old darling, Clementine.

It has been more than a month since I got home from this trip, but now at long last I posted a bit about it.

On the 4th, Yonna and I put in a solid 8. We each managed to complete a skirt that fits us. We had to apply the lessons we learned in our “Cute Skirts” class we took together at Cool Cottons the first two Wednesdays of June.

While technically the skirts made in that class can be worn, we learned some important lessons that we wanted to apply:

1. Pick a pattern with your fabric that doesn’t look strange in the seams.
2. As an example, here is the skirt I made in class, where some of the birds have become decapitated by the seams:
   vs the material and seams of the skirt I made on Friday:

   

3. Make sure you cut the pattern and fabric in a size that fits. While our first skirts technically fit, they didn’t “hang” the way they should if they truly fit. It’s hard to know which measurements to follow, the waist or the hips, but we learned that if you want the skirt to fit nearer the hips than the waist, use the hip measurement. We tried this with our second skirts, and while still a bit lose, they fit and hang as we hoped.

I’m putting that second lesson to the test now. I spent the rest of the week-end washing fabric, ironing and cutting fabric for a dress I hope to have made and ready to wear at Dylan and Verena’s wedding next week in Hawaii. Luckily, my mom comes to town tonight and has offered to help me with this project. Wish us luck!