I was sewing a lot, desperately trying to stay ahead of the threatening avalanche of cloth. A lot of it was my own thrift-store purchases, for which I had enough storage space (sort of) until I had to give up one of my basement rooms. I sorted and re-folded and even sent some less-desirable fabric (what was I thinking of when I picked up that stuff?) back to a thrift store, and I thought I was making some progress.
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| The shelf is bending under the weight of neatly-folded wool. We'll need some extra brackets before I can hang more clothes on that dowel |
Then my loving daughters showed up with more cloth! Around Remembrance Day Jodi showed up here with a large duffle bag full of fabric she picked up at the Good Neighbor store -- just for me. Well, not all for me -- Damon picked out some choice red and black pieces and said "Hey Mom, can you make me some new fighter garb from this?" A day or two later Raven showed up with four boxes and a few bags of surplus material and no-longer-needed garb. Yikes! How am I going to process all that stuff?
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| There's the table full of the goodies my darling daughters gave to me! |
I already had plenty of projects on the go. One was a dress made from a fine 100% wool twill which Victory had given me some years before. I liked everything about the material except the colour, a sort-of-blah-pinkish-grey. It had been washed a couple of times before I cut out the pattern pieces. There was barely enough fabric for the dress I wanted to make.
Then I had a terrible thought: what if it shrinks a bit more? I serged all the edges of all the cut-out pieces and washed them once more. Sure enough: a bit more shrinkage. I assembled the dress with the narrowest seam allowance possible, just a hair wider than the serging, and had to re-do many of the seams because a bit of the serging showed on the good side. When I tried on the dress it was too small, of course. Extra under-arm gussets fixed that problem somewhat. Front lacing provided a bit more breathing room but oh, making all those eyelets was a pain!
I tried on the dress while at Coronet and with Jodi's input decided that maybe it would be OK but all the seams would have to be stitched down because the narrow seam allowances wouldn't lie flat. Maybe the nondescript color would look better when worn with strongly contrasting colors….
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| Trying on the unfinished dress in the washroom: it fits, but not with that underdress! |
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| And a washroom selfie taken at the same time, just because |
And then I was put on vigil. Suddenly I needed new clothes for my elevation, only three weeks away!
I did the math: one week for felling all the seams, one week for a navy underdress with a row of buttons on each sleeve, and two or three days for an unlined hood with buttons. Machine stitching on the inside of the garments but only hand stitching on the outside…. yes, it could be done.
The entire outfit was finished a couple of days ahead of schedule. The annoying overdress fit better than expected after it was ironed. Many people commented favourably on my clothes and, after looking at all the pictures, I feel quite pleased with how they turned out!
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| A close-up of all the buttons, taken during the elevation ceremony |
