Jen and Jay's Wedding in Ojai, California

We are back from my nephew's wedding at the Ojai Valley Inn and Spa in Ojai, California. Wow.  We had an amazing time; what a great place to have a wedding.    Ojai and the surrounding area is lovely, with great trails to walk and bike and hiking up into the mountains. The spot at top is Sesar Canyon.  Our instructions were to drive up past the houses until we couldn't drive any further.Early in the morning it was cool and lovely.

 We visited an artisan small olive oil producer in the center of olive and orange groves and bought delicious local olive oil and flavored, aged balsamic vinegar from Italy.
The town is lovely with good restaurants, galleries and shops. Even if you don't have a wedding to go to, this is a great place to vacation.

But, this is a sewing blog and I'm sure you are more interested in what I wore to the wedding. 

In an earlier post on what the hell  was I going to wear to this wedding I decided to copy these two pieces from Helmut Lang.

To make the pieces dressier I chose to make them in black 11 ounce rayon lycra jersey from emmaonesock and lengthened the skirt.  Both pieces are self drafted, of which I am very proud. My tnt tee shirt  was the base for  top draft.  I don't think that this is how the original was drafted, but I like how it came out. I had found a couple of methods for drafting a cowl neck but nothing that would give me an exact replica of the top. I did have some issues with the shoulder position. It  made me realize that the shoulder seam position on my original pattern is too far forward.  It's not an issue when the front and back seams are the same angle, but it did matter here. I had to adjust the shoulder angle on the back piece after some trial and error and  had to cut another front.

The skirt started out as a Burda pencil skirt.  The top layer is slightly gathered at the left hip. the shape, as you can see of the front pieces are not identical. It wasn't hard to draft, but it needed to be worked out in the muslin I made. It's not exactly the same as the original;  I'll call it 'inspired' by.  The waistband is attached, but narrower then on the original.  It's also elastic. There's really not much to say about these pretty simple pieces. They were easy to sew and great for packing.