Time goes by fast!

Well time sure fly's when life happens. As you all know our youth had the privilege in participation in a temple celebration for the new Oquirrh Mountain Temple. The celebration was a singing and dancing celebration that consisted of 25 stakes. Our stake and another stake had the opportunity to do the 'Roaring Twenties'. The performance was to be held at the conference center so the there was only space for 300 youth to do the dance. The choir however there was no limits on how many youth could participate.

In February they held the fireside that was to get all the kids excited and then the practices were starting in March. I didn't want to go to the fireside because I was busy doing something else but the girls coerced me into going. I was sitting there watching the video presentation they had from another temple and I was very excited to participate in the making of the costumes. I started to argue with myself telling myself that there was no way that I could to the costumes for this and Trek. Just then the spirit hit me soo hard that if I was not already sitting down I would have fallen over. I did not argue another second. After the fireside I made a b-line for the costume director Kim Doyle. We had worked together on a play for Herriman city so we knew each other already. I told her I was her woman so what ever she needed to let me know. She told me that she would be meeting with the other stake soon and then we would get started.

In the mean time I was well involved with the Trek sewing. I had arranged with each of the wards to get a night and volunteers and fabrics together to get all the girls sewing needs done. Since Wal-Mart does not carry bonnets in stock, or bloomers, we had to make them. I organized several nights where I took all my machines, I have two sewing and two sergers, to the cultural hall with tons of donated fabrics. The bulk of the fabric was donated by Wendy Metz who is my neighbor, she is a fabric alcoholic and has soo much extra fabric. She blames it on working at Wal-Mart and fabric stores for 20 years. Well anyway, I was able to get several ladies from each ward and several from the same wards to come out each Wednesday to get the girls started. We sewed skirts, aprons with pockets, bonnets, and bloomers. There was a total of 170 youth that went on trek so in addition to the clothing I was in charge of making neck coolers. With the adults we made 240 neck coolers.

So at one of these nights it happen to be the middle of April, the 25th to be exact, that i ran into Kim. I had not heard anything from her yet and we were running drastically short on time. I cornered her and asked what was going on. She confided in me that she was having a very difficult time getting along with the other stake and that the other stake had taken much of the control and was making most of the decisions. I told her that she needed to go up the food chain then so that we could get what we needed to get started. In the mean time, we went over to the rehearsal and measure all of the girls so that when we finally did get all the stuff we would be able to get started right away.

She was able to get 7 copies of the same pattern and the fabric with in a week. The pattern was a size 8,10,12 with no sizing chart or instructions. Now I know how to put it together but I didn't plan on being the only one to sew so I wasn't about to send that out to people with out instructions. I decided that it would be better to re-work the pattern anyway because I had to make additional sizes because I don't know about you, but there are very few people that are a size 8,10,12 in a pattern that equates to about a size 2,4,6 in pants at the store. In the mean time there continued to be animosity between the two stake representatives so I sent an email to the lady in the other stake because Kim was frustrated with her and we were not getting things done. I told her that I was the head seamstress in our stake and that I needed the sizing chart, instructions and other information in order to get started. She emailed me back telling me she was glad to finally glad to have someone who knew what they were doing to contact. I was hurt that she did not feel that way about Kim.

Anyway the pattern had cap sleeves and had we started a month earlier that would have been fine, but I did not want to take the time to put in a cap sleeve in 104 dresses. I made the sleeve into the pattern called a 'T' tunic. This was more reminiscent of the time era anyway. It made it look more like the 'rag tag' sleeve, it was also much easier to sew. Since I had already acquired all the numbers and things from all over the stake I was able to set up a night were we could cut out dresses and even start sewing. There were three colors so I made four copies of each size 6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22. Then we all met at the stake center. We got out all of the long tables and lined three of them up together making a very long table for each color. We began laying out patterns and cutting out dresses. We quickly learned that there needed to be more organization. There was not an even number of each size so we had to check off dresses on the measurement sheets to make sure we had the right number of each size cut out. We put each dress into a plastic zip lock bag to keep them all organized.