YesterYear Festival 2009

Here you have me and the YesterYear Festival Princess 2009. The princess is my husband's partner's daughter. Let's see if I can make a long story short. Basically this festival has a Princess every year and two Ladies in Waiting. Each girl has a royal court that consists of small children. Every year there is a new theme for the event. This year the theme was "Home For The Holidays" The Princess court represented Christmas, and one Lady In Waiting represented Valentine's Day, and the other, Halloween. This event took place in the heat of the summer and if you are wondering why Valentine's Day and Halloween for holidays to come home for, don't ask me. I didn't make these decisions :) Now here is where I get involved. The Princess needed someone to act as a court mom for her court and she also needed my help in getting everything ready for her because her mother was having health issues during this entire process. (March-August). One of my duties involved finding a seamstress to make 10 dresses total. 9 of the dresses basically mirrored the Princess dress. Along with overseeing the seamstress makign 10 dresses, I also had to make her 14 foot by 6 foot Christmas themed train for the back of her dress. So, that's the long and short of it and here are some of the pictures of the process.

I had the seamstress build the plain base of the train you see above. I had to enlist my sweet husband to help me steam it.

I had a sketch of what was wanted on the train so I had to figure out how to bring it to life. These are foam bolsters we used to make pillar candles for the train.

I had to cut the bolsters into half circles to make the candles look three dimensional on the train. I put spray adhesive on them and covered them with satin.

Here are the candles completed. They now have flames that are made out of several different textiles with wire in the middle of them and they appear to be sitting on a bed a gold lame and holly leaves.

Here is the completed 14 foot train in my bedroom. The holly leaves are all three dimensional. They alone took two people working on them. The hours in the holly leaves alone add up to 24 man hours. I quit clocking the time after that because I was very overwhelming.


Here is the Princess with the Ladies In Waiting doing an outdoor photo shoot for the newspaper a month before the festival.

Here are my two little ones that were on the royal court. The girls are called Maidens and the boys are called Pages. This is on dress rehearsal night.

Dress rehearsal night was very long. We had to have all the courts do group photos. The kids were worn out when it was all said and done.

Here is my attempt to get a photo of all three courts together and still stay out of the photographers way :)

After rehearsal night there is a big production the next night called The Review. After The Review, all the parents on each court have to go decorate the parade float. This picture above is the banner for in front of the float. At the last minute I was asked to whip up something to decorate the corners of the banner. Lucky for me Hobby Lobby had Christmas stuff out In August. :)

Parade day!

The train is pinned down to the back of the float to prevent it from blowing around and the wind taking the train and the Princess completley off the float.

After The Review night and the parade the next day, we get to have a Ball to celebrate and finally relax at the end of the festival weekend. So here are my little Page and Maiden with the Princess at the final event.

After the parade the trains of the dresses are put on display at the venue where the ball is held.
So, there you have it the short story of the YesterYear festival. I'm really wondering if I can turn my little Maidens dress into the Queen of Hearts costume from "Alice In Wonderland" for Halloween. I let you know if that ever happens :)