This past summer has been a little different in being caretaker of my mom. The only big project that I took underway was to paint and redecorate one of my guest bedrooms which is shown in an earlier blog post on this blog, but with fall now officially here, Labor Day weekend came in quite handy. I needed a royal purple and navy blue dress for the FOT choir, and the only royal purple dress that I had was from my brother and sister in laws wedding which is really a little "too flashy" to wear in a choir group setting even though I did wear it last year, and I've had the same navy blue dress for years! I designed the two dresses in my head knowing that I wanted my navy blue opening night dress to be simple and elegant, and knowing that I wanted my LGD royal purple dress to be more on the formal side, yet not too flashy.
ABOVE and BELOW is what I came up with as my LGD dress. I didn't sketch it out, just pictured it, and sewed it. It's pretty simple with a formal touch. My fav part of this design is the functional train. I created a video of how it's a "hands free" CCoatsOfManyColours! functional train design.
VIDEO of train on dress design and how it's a hands free functional train
BELOW: The Opening Night navy blue dress design
Really simple design. I'm headed to a place with warmer temperature, so that made it easy since sleeves weren't needed. I kept the dress ankle length to avoid it from being too formal, and added the bling on top off centered to give this dress a little quiet flare.
Finished this CCoatsOfManyColours! necktie as a gift along with a ladies matching shawl to compliment it though I technically was finished with this project before Labor Day.
Thanks to the power of suggestion by Paulette Corey, I made homemade peach fruit roll-ups in my dehydrator for the first time. I really got a thrill out of this. Healthy fruit roll-ups. All I did was take one large tasty peach that was sweet enough on its own, and pureed it with a touch of lemon juice, spread it thinly in my dehydrator, and after 21 hours on the top shelf in my machine, they were ready. They came out with pretty much the same texture as the store bought, but without the preservatives!
While I was at it, I cut up 3 more peaches, dehydrated them, and had peach chips.
Added blueberries to the dehydrator as well. ABOVE: is how the fruit roll up looked in "raw form."
Voila! Peach chips and dehydrated blueberries. I decided to use the blueberries to make homemade chocolates, so I put them in a chocolate mold.
Why buy a double boiler when you can "do it yourself?" :-) I'm just joking, if you have one, that is great, but I'm cheap and just fill up a slightly larger pot with water, and then place in a slightly smaller pot in the water, turn on the heat, and you can leave the chocolate pretty much unattended, and it will melt without burning or sticking to the pot.
Once melted poured the chocolate over the dehydrated blueberries, placed the mold in the frig, and when set, popped out the chocolate candy. These are yummy, if you like blueberries anyway.
Once I got going I decided to go the whole nine yards and used organic unsweetened...AKA real coconut and made the below chocolate candy.
...and then thought roasted almond chocolates, below, would also be yummy topped with sea salt. Oh, don't believe me, you have to try these yourself. The sea salt crystals add that finishing touch. My plan is to box them up kind of professionally this evening and share them by gifting them out hopefully tomorrow if time allows.
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