I’m taking you behind the scenes on capturing some 135 hours of hand embroidery as well as our photoshoot with sweet daisy.

Editing this dress, it was quite the process!

So how did I gather the footage for the hand embroidery part? I setup a gopro on time lapse mode (and tried to keep it in the same location, but alas, life happens and the tripod gets bumped around 🤷‍♀️).


By the end of the hand embroidery party, I had 240 GBS of footage… I know!! 😳

My jaw dropped when I saw the total tally up transferring the files. I knew it was going to be big, but 240 gbs… wow! I got the files in, dumped them into final cut, and had myself a time lapse of the hand embroidery that was 9 hours long.

Again, my jaw dropped. 😳

Yes, that really says 8:58:42… as in a time lapse lasting 8 hours, 58 minutes, and 42 seconds. I guess we could tack on those 11 milliseconds if we really wanted to get anal, but 🤷‍♀️

I tried to clean things up as best as I could… trying to align the position of the embroidery hoop from one clip to the next, cleaning up the lighting as best as I could, and removing any dead times (maybe I got another cup of coffee or something).

Then I sped up the time lapse and exported as a video file. Now I could transfer those 240 gbs off my hardrive and instead use this new time lapse of the time lapse video file for the hand embroidery portion of the video editing.

By the time I added the additional footage for the construction of the dress, I was well over 300 gbs. Doing the math backwards, it seems that I spend 135 hours on the hand embroidery.


It was a marathon, not a sprint. Most sewing sessions were 30-45 minutes, although some were as short as 10 minutes and others were as long as 3 hours or so (although rare…). The vast majority of this embroidery design was completed about 30 minutes at a time.


the turtle wins the race, one stitch at a time 🐢❤️

Driving Miss Daisy

What about those final shots of our sweet wildflower in her dress? How did those happen?


Daisy skipped school that day (shhh 😘) and we took her to Chimney Rock State Park. Charley and I have season passes that we’ve been thoroughly enjoying this year.

I experimented making sans gluten + added sugar chocolate and carrot cakes …they actually turned out okay! 🥳 Daisy’s favorite was the carrot cake, and I had to agree with her.

It was really nice getting one-on-one time with Daisy. She’s our third baby, and she’s full of spunk, compassion, and wicked smart. She also has a fairly dry sense of humor, that showed through even as a tiny baby. Girlfriend’s sarcasm is next-level.

So after our picnic, then we set out to do photos. We took the elevator up, but then did the final 20 steps or so (and these are fairly steep, top are uneven stone stairs) to get to the chimney rock peak.

I should mention, of all our visits to Chimney Rock, we’d never seen so many people here. Normally Charley and I see about 10 folks in total.

Do you see this parking lot?? 😲

Blahh… so yeah, Daisy walked her sweet self up those steps and we tried to get some photos at the top of Chimney Rock, but alas, too many folks.

It was also fairly sunny, so we came back down those steps (yes, Daisy did them by herself again! baller, baller!) and we went down one of the trails.

This is where the magic happened. It was like walking into a fairytale forest. Quiet, breezy, birds chirping …and our sweet wildflower skipping away!

We took our time, enjoying the trail, and taking pictures along the way. I’m really not playing that “social media life was perfect” angle – it actually was super peaceful and enjoyable.

Charley and I both had a camera, which was a fun change. Many photoshoots are fairly hectic since we’re juggling four kiddos on our own, and it’s all we have to get one camera to capture something worthwhile, ha!

Along the path, we came across a babbling creek and some fairytale wooden steps.

She also found a walnut, and thought that was the coolest thing 🥰


Before we made the drive back home, we revisited our chocolate and carrot experimental cakes.

We also stopped by a farm in Hendersonville. Daisy got a peach and then we got one of those large, oval watermelons for the other kiddos.

I’m not at all trying to describe us as stellar parents, actually, this was kinda a selfish move on our part. The goal for the watermelon was to secure some outside playtime on the weekend, but it didn’t go as planned.

The kiddos went outside, gobbled up the watermelon, and then demanded to come back inside …ten minutes later, and now covered in sticky, watermelon juice 🤪

Oooh kids! Hope y’all enjoyed this behind the scenes look. Check out this video that shows a time-lapse of the entire construction process including all the hand embroidery.

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