shawl lapel waistcoat (r's "old-timey" vest)

never thought i'd title a blog post like that! man oh man, dressing for a wedding is a difficult business! holy crap! i thought i had it rough when i changed the style for my dress. turns out the dress i'm so in love with requires "allover guipure lace." and oh my gawd, that stuff runs upwards of $100/yard when you can even find it! now i know why the dress is $2000. holy crap. but i think (i think i think) i've found something suitable. we shall see.

but then there is r's suit. well, waistcoat, to be specific. he found a suit he just loves (and i love it, too) through a custom clothier in portland. of course it would be in portland, everything fabulous in the world is in portland, and that's why we want to move there. but we aren't there, we're in san diego. anyhow, said custom suit (minus the jacket because who needs that?) is appropriately expensive. and this wedding is really all about inexpensiveness.

so a second round of endless internet searching ensued. all the same stuff as for my lace - image search, shopping search, random internet vintage store search, european store search, ebay, etsy, you name it. looks like he's either going to have to get it made in england, cough up the dough for duchess, hope that he can find it in a vintage store somewhere in pdx during our one day there before the wedding, or hope that my sewing skills have magically improved in the ten or so years that i have, ahem, not been sewing:

i found this pattern and i hope it makes some sense to me. what we've figured out is that he likes the collar style of the top one (that's the shawl lapel part, by the by) and the front cut of the lower one. so. do i have magic latent sewing skills just waiting to blossom? hey, you never know. what i learned from making my test dress pattern last week was that i am much more patient with scissors, pins, patterns, and threads than i used to be and that i am much more conscientious of the importance of detail when there's a wedding on the line. so hey, miracles could happen. but i'm still glad we have a weekend in portland in our back pockets, just in case...