On the Eve of Prom

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Hello dear ones, and welcome to the last day before prom and all of its craziness in the world of dressmaking!  I feel like I have hardly left the craft room all week long, logging an average of eight hours per day working on Renaissance’s dress.  (Keep in mind that from 2:30pm onwards, I generally have no say over how my day goes because it’s all chauffeuring and music lessons and dinner prep and cleanup.)  I have had some very long days this week!

Top priorities this past week:

  • Finishing Renaissance’s prom dress
  • Starting Rachel’s church prom dress, if possible

Creativity

The weather has cooperated with me this week and was mostly rainy and gray, which makes me feel entirely NOT guilty for staying inside and sewing all day, ha ha ha.  I got the skirt attached correctly to Renaissance’s dress and went about my merry way with attaching the lining to the bodice, sewing in the sleeves (which, if I may say, I did an excellent job on the sleeves!), and then hemming the skirts.

Marking the hem of this dress was a memory I’ll keep, and not for any particularly memorable reason.  It was just nice to spend that time with Renaissance, amidst the flurry of a busy day, where she got to put on her dress for the first time and we were able to ooh and aah over it and let the excitement build.  If you’re looking to strengthen the upper half of your posterior muscle chain, I highly recommend marking hems on skirts.  I’m sure there’s an easier way to do it, but I had to lay on my stomach and keep my head and shoulders lifted for thirty minutes while I measured and marked the entirety of the hem.  I was sore the next day!

I am hoping I can get in and redo the top skirt’s hem because it’s looking “homemade” in a bad way.  After scrutinizing it I decided to change my approach on the bottom skirt’s hem and sew it by hand and I think it’s looking much better.  It just takes forever.  I’ve got about 12-14 inches left to hem, which will take 30-45 minutes.  I still need to trim the top skirt because it’s dragging on the one side, so I’ll do that by hand tonight and then I’ll unpick and re-hem by hand portions of the top skirt until I either finish it or run out of time.

Thank goodness I found a backup dress for Rachel.  I have had no time whatsoever to even begin working on her dress.

Gardening

In brief moments of time away from the prom dress, I cleaned out my countertop garden.  It had reached 100 days of growing and most of the plants had died off, but the three basil plants were still going strong.  It was the first time I’ve cleaned it out and discovered that you definitely want to remove any spent pods when they die because if you don’t, the roots will start rotting and molding underwater, which made for a lot of unpleasantness.

I harvested the last of my basil plants and made pesto for a soup I made during the week.  Unfortunately, the basil plants had passed the point of maturity and the pesto ended up tasting exceptionally “green.”  It’s such a delicate dance of allowing the basil leaves to get large enough, but not so large that their flavor starts to mimic lawn grass.

Caring

Nathaniel had his first home cross country meet this week, and it works out that it starts right after Renaissance’s oboe lesson ends, and her oboe lesson is at his school, so she just walked on over and we cheered him on.  I’m so proud of him.  Last summer he realized it would be easier to be healthy if he became a runner, so he decided to join track and cross country.  He’s literally in it just for the exercise.

Well, I wish you a happy Friday and ensuing weekend and look forward to sharing prom photos with you next week.  (I need to remember to charge my camera’s batteries!)  Cross your fingers that I can finish up Ren’s dress to a “good homemade” level!

Prom Dress Crunch Time

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The high school prom will be THIS Saturday! I think I’ll be good to finish Renaissance’s dress. I made an atrocious error on it on Saturday, so I’ve spent this morning seam ripping the entire skirt so I could re-attach it correctly. I am normally really good about going through a pattern’s instructions beforehand and highlighting any weird steps so I don’t make mistakes during construction, but I managed to miss reading a very important moment when I was supposed to sew the right side of the skirt to the wrong side of the lining, and ended up sewing right sides together which resulted in the skirt being sewn on inside-out. Joy of joys. I’ve atoned for my mistake and unpicked the two rows of sewing AND the row of hand basting, and then did them all over again. Yep, winning.

Note to self: For future sewing, look for any steps that deviate from the default “right sides together” and highlight the heck out of them.

Another prom-related development happened on Friday: A mom in Ren’s friend group texted the group chat and asked where everyone wanted to eat dinner for prom, we weighed in, and she texted us back saying that a reservation for four had been successfully made. I had been under the impression that the one friend wasn’t going to go to the high school prom, so I turned to Rachel and asked her if she knew who he was going to prom with and she said, “Me.”

My mouth dropped, my shoulders caved, my eyes widened, “What?!?”

Rachel, upon seeing the change in my posture, got a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face, “I forgot to tell you, didn’t I? He asked yesterday and we bought the tickets today.”

I spent the next two hours working on Ren’s dress and mulling over the logistics of finishing that dress AND Rachel’s dress in a week, and ultimately decided to send out an SOS to friends to see if anyone had a dress that Rachel could borrow for the high school prom because I highly doubt I can pull off finishing both dresses in time. A few people responded, for which I am so, so grateful!

A back-up dress has been secured, it is less modest than I normally would consider, but at the end of the day no one will die and the world will continue to turn. Rachel is thrilled because she’s always wanted to wear a dress with this neckline but has had the good sense to not push for something like it, so everyone is relatively happy.

So this week will be all about finishing up Ren’s dress and getting a head start on Rachel’s dress for the church formal. I’ll post if I have time, but don’t surprised if I don’t.

Gathering Steam

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Welcome to the end of my first week back after the Big Spring Sickness of 2024!  Whew, it was a nasty bug—I’ve heard that multiple people in our area required medical intervention due to it.  Ugh, so much exhaustion experienced by all.  All in all, though, it was a good week full of good weather and a lot of productivity.

Top priorities this past week:

  • Prom Dressses
  • Garden tasks
  • Driver’s licenses tasks

Creativity

Ren’s Prom Dress:  I was still quite weak at the beginning of the week, so progress on Ren’s prom dress didn’t happen until Wednesday, but I put in about four hours of work and all of the basic elements of the dress (Bodice, lining, underskirt) are assembled in their basic forms and I can now move forward with attaching them to each other and doing finishing work.  The end is in sight!

Rachel’s Prom Dress:  I’ve not made any progress on this, which is extremely unfortunate because I was supposed to begin working on it in earnest this week.  We’ll get there when we get there.

Garden

I actually used some of the rhubarb this week, which was good because it’s starting to become a behemoth of a plant! We had a lovely rhubarb/mixed fruit crumble for dessert one night. Soooo good.

I got caught up on starting seeds and direct sowing seeds!  Renaissance helped me plant four different varieties of marigolds in one starting tray, and I planted sweet peppers, hot peppers, pepperoncini peppers, Big Daddy tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, zucchini, crookneck squash, broccoli, and cilantro in the other tray.  I still have a few spots open for some more seeds in the second tray, which I might use for some herbs. 

I transplanted my started pansies and delphiniums into the garden, but they’ve been struggling for weeks in their trays and I do not know what to expect from them in the future. 

I direct sowed the last bit of peas, and some Bells of Ireland and Four O’ Clocks.  I also went back and fortified the trellises with better staples to hold them to the ground for the peas and sweet peas.

Caring

Driver’s Licenses: Renaissance is officially a licensed driver!  WOO HOO!  We finally did it!  I took her to the DOL on Tuesday and she’s got the paper!  We are waiting for our insurance company to get back to us on adding her to our policy, and once we have that confirmation she’ll be good to go.  She can’t park on campus until she has proof of insurance, so we’re waiting on that task as well.  Michael is also replacing the brakes on the kids’ car this weekend so they can be extra safe.

Rachel has been studying every afternoon for her Driver’s Knowledge test this weekend.  It’s a good thing I made a note to make sure she was doing this—every afternoon has found her completely forgetful of the task AND I had to intervene at one point because she was playing video games while listening to a YouTube video about driving rules and considered it as studying.  Uh, no.  I’ve not been her favorite person this week because I keep insisting on nitty gritty studying tactics.  You’ll thank me when you pass the test, girlie.

Emily hasn’t done any practice driving because I’ve been too busy with getting caught up with life this week, but I’ve scheduled daily drives for the next six weeks to get her back up to snuff.

Regarding the bridal shower and wedding gifts, I think I’ll just return them to Amazon and then re-order them and have them delivered to the couple’s new address.  I still need to text the mom and get that figured out.

Renaissance and I sat down to talk about her post-high school plans and run the numbers.  She qualified for every merit and music scholarship available at the colleges, but we are just middle-class enough to not warrant any financial assistance via the FAFSA, so she was going to be on the line for $17,000-30,000 per year to attend the four-year universities she was thinking about attending.  That is simply not feasible for her, so she’s going to go with her alternate plan of attending technical college and earning an associate degree in culinary & pastry arts so that she can have a marketable skill that can then help her finance her future plans.  She was really torn between studying music or studying pastry, so either option was fine with her.  The pastry program is good in that she can then transfer to a four-year school and earn some sort of business and/or food science degree, if she desires.  I think she wants to eventually open a bakery of her own, and that she wants to work with local high school students and the community to offer educational opportunities and/or internships in culinary areas.

I’m disappointed that the money couldn’t work out for a four-year option.  I entered the financials into a copy of the spreadsheet that I had made when we did this for Emily two years ago, and I was appalled to find out that one of the schools they both applied to increased their tuition by $17,000 in just two years!  It’s bonkers out there, and it led to some very serious conversations with Emily this week in order to adjust her expectations for the future as well.  You just can’t expect an 18-22 year old and their family to cough out or sign up for loans in the amount of $120,000 for a college education at a Division 3 school!  That’s almost the cost of our first house!  Gross.  The technical school option will end up costing just $8,000 a year, which is a sum we can work with.  And HELLO…a pastry chef in the family?  That’s just cool.  Ren was also wise and applied to start in January so she can spend a few more months working to save up money to pay for it all.  If you know of any bakeries hiring, she’s looking!

It was a really busy week, with a lot of important things happening, and I think it’s turned out well.  Hopefully this weekend sees a lot of time for sewing, weeding, and driving practice!  

Layer Cake Latte Quilt Fabric Choices, or “Why I Chose the Fabrics that I Chose”

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I had fun picking out the fabric for this quilt because there were A LOT of great collections that have come out in the past little while. So many that I actually got a little overwhelmed with my options and decided to poll my Facebook friends on what collection they would choose:

I was really surprised that the winner of the poll was #5: “Antoinette,” by French General for Moda, followed by a tie for second, with only one vote less, of #3 “Honey & Lavender,” by Deb Strain for Moda, and #6 “Lemon Bouquet,” by Timeless Treasures Fabrics.

I had already been leaning towards #1 “French Quarter,” by Maywood Studios because I’ve been slowly morphing my home’s decor towards a blue and white palette, but it really surprised me how few votes the collection got in comparison to the other collections. I love two color quilts and I assumed everyone else did as well. The only other collection to get less votes was #2 with all the reds. Two color quilts are not a favorite amongst the people I know.

So I decided to just mock them all up in the quilt pattern so that people could understand why I was going to go with French Quarter despite it not winning the poll—namely, because the contrast was going to be excellent. I thanked everyone for voting and promised them that I’d show them what each collection looked like once the quilt pattern was released, and so here we are. I present to you, dear friends, what the Layer Cake Latte quilt could have looked like in the different collection options:

#1: French Quarter, from Maywood Studios

#2: Heirloom Red, by My Mind’s Eye from Riley Blake Designs

#3: “Honey & Lavender,” by Deb Strain for Moda Fabrics

#4: “Honeybloom,” by 3 Sisters for Moda Fabrics
I mocked this up with two different background colors because I really liked the blue in the collection.

#5: “Antoinette,” by French General for Moda Fabrics

#6: “Lemon Bouquet,” Timeless Treasures Fabrics
I mocked it up with two background colors because I saw the Kona Color of the Year, Mint Julep, and thought it might work well.

I like my quilts to have a fair amount of contrast between the background fabrics and the showcased fabrics, so French Quarter was my ultimate choice, but I did think long and hard about going with Honey & Lavender because I really liked the look of that one as well. I don’t decorate with a lot of purple in my house, so I went with the blue.

But there you go, friends, the visuals that helped me choose my colors. Seeing them mocked up, which fabric collection would you have gone with?

Layer Cake Latte Quilt, a new pattern from Fat Quarter Shop

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It’s the day, it’s the day! Time to show you the Layer Cake Latte quilt in all its mostly-finished glory.

Details:

Pattern: Layer Cake Latte Quilt, a FREE pattern by Fat Quarter Shop.

Fabric: A layer cake of “French Quarter,” by Maywood Studios, and a layer cake of White Bella Solids (98), plus a little extra yardage of the solid for the border.

Thread: Piecing: 50 weight Aurifil, Natural White #2021

This is another pattern in Fat Quarter Shop’s “Shortcut Quilt” series, which starts with some sort of precut and creates a quilt from there. I especially like these kinds of patterns because I really working with precuts.

The pattern uses two layer cakes–one of prints, one solid—and I ran into the problem of my whites not matching up well.  French Quarter’s white is more of an ivory/muslin/natural white, and stock was low of those whites in solid layer cakes when I was ordering my fabric, so I just went with a regular pure white and told myself it would be an experiment to find out if it really does matter as much as I think it does to match your whites perfectly. Result of experiment: Totally fine. I don’t mind the “mismatch” at all, and actually like that it makes it easier to see the difference between the two colors.

If you love half-square triangles, this pattern is full of them. If you can tap into a meditative flow state whilst trimming HSTs, prepare for some blissful sewing.

Fat Quarter Shop is releasing the free pattern today, and will be offering a full kit to purchase to make up your own pretty soon.

Thank you so much, Fat Quarter Shop, for the opportunity to sew this up! I enjoyed it immensely!

This post contains affiliate links

Well, That Was Unfortunate Timing

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Nathaniel was sick for the entirety of Spring Break, and on Saturday I woke up feeling…off. Michael took Ren to the school for Daffodil Parades so I could get my energy up and meet them at one of the later parades, but within a few hours it was very clear that I had caught Nathaniel’s bug and was out of the running for anything beyond laying on the couch and watching television through bleary eyes. And so it went for the remainder of last week. And this last weekend. And today. I am having a heck of a time with this illness.

I’m hoping the exhaustion and relentless coughing starts to fade this week because I was supposed to finish Ren’s prom dress last week and this was the week to start working on Rachel’s dress. Stress levels are high.

Cooking

This week’s meal plan:

  • Saturday: Chicken Shawarma
  • Sunday: Cheesy Ham and Potatoes for Nathaniel’s birthday
  • Monday: Dino Nuggets, French Fries, Mixed Vegetables
  • Tuesday: Crockpot Chili & Baked Potatoes
  • Wednesday: Cheeseburgers, Spiced Braised Rhubarb
  • Thursday: Crockpot Honey Chicken
  • Friday: Salad Bar

Clothing

Catching up after missing all of last week’s laundry.

Cleaning

Catch up, basic upkeep.

Caring

  • Renaissance passed her driver’s license test last week! There’s still a lot of paperwork to get her driving legally on her own, and it is a high priority this week. I am really looking forward to this development.
  • Rachel is taking her driver’s license knowledge test later this week, so helping her study for that.
  • Emily, possibly spurred on by the success of her younger sisters in the driver’s license department, has finally renewed her driving permit and is now legal to start practicing for her own driver’s license, so I imagine I need to start making time for her practicing, too.
  • Need to figure out a way to get the bridal shower and wedding gifts to the young woman who got married last week. I was too sick to go and she and her husband have headed back to school already.
  • We need to sit down with Renaissance and figure out her post-high school plans. She’s received news of the various scholarships she’s been awarded, the FAFSA is taking forever to process, and we just need to sit down and crunch numbers. Her high school is having their Decision Day soon where they celebrate kids’ post-high school plans, so it’d be good if she knew what she was doing by that date.

Creativity

  • Prom Dresses: I haven’t touched either of them since I got sick. So much work needs to be done this week. The extra yard of silk for Ren’s sleeves arrived safely last week, so we’re good to go there. I have two weeks’ less time to get Ren’s dress done because last night she got a text to look outside:

How cute is that?!?! Why weren’t Promposals a thing when we were young? He had good timing; we were just getting ready to have Nathaniel’s birthday cake, so he walked away from the incident with a prom date and birthday cake. On a frenzied prom dress-sewing note, though…the high school prom is two weeks before the church Spring Formal, so…I really need to sew faster.

  • Van Crafting Sessions™: I think I have a full schedule of music lessons this week and I have no idea what I’m going to do while I’m at them.

Gardening

  • The rhubarb is growing fast! Gotta start using it.
  • I didn’t do any planting last week, so I need to do both last week’s and this week’s planting and seed starting. We’re getting into the thick of planting season!

Celebrating

  • Nathaniel had his 14th birthday yesterday! I can’t believe my youngest child is starting high school next year. Where have the years gone?!?! Renaissance made him a Sherman Tank cake this year, in homage to his interest in World War 2.
  • Upcoming celebrations include:
    • Mother’s Day, which I don’t have to do anything for
    • My birthday, which I generally don’t have to do anything for
    • Memorial Day, which just means grilling some hot dogs and doing yardwork
    • Ren’s graduation, which is going to take a ton of work
    • Father’s Day, which I will also have to do work for.

I’m going to wait a bit before I get going on anything so I can focus on prom dresses.

Community

  • Band Parent meeting this week, with all the requisite paperwork and follow-up that goes with it.
  • There’s a Ward Potluck on the calendar from the email that the bishop sent out at the beginning of the year, but I’ve not heard anything else about it since, so I’m thinking it never materialized.
  • There’s a Relief Society activity this week about simplifying our lives, but it’s happening at the same time as a music lesson, so I probably won’t go.
  • Band performance for the seniors.

Alright, a big week with a lot of catch-up and I’m not feeling that great to begin with. Wish me luck! And look at this great photo of Renaissance in the Daffodil Parade, taken by a friend of a friend:

Spring Break Prom Dress Progress

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Welcome to the end of Spring Break and the weekly progress report on the Pretty Purple Prom Dresses! Thank goodness for a week off of our normal activities because I needed it to get through a big chunk of sewing of Renaissance’s dress. I think I put in about nineteen hours’ worth of work on this over the past week, which could not have happened if I’d been running around doing all the regular chauffeuring and homework minding that I usually do.

I need a name for Ren’s dress, and I think I will call it the “Celestial Dress” because the colors remind me of the colors of the morning glories in the “Celestial Mix” that I just planted.

I finished up the (third) muslin on Saturday, was busy with Easter on Sunday, felt sick on Monday and got nothing done, and took advantage of the last of the good weather on Tuesday to do some much needed work in the yard. So I didn’t come back to the dress until Wednesday: Cutting Day.

The morning sun was shining through the side window of my craft room and just perfectly caught the color-shift of this “Comet Tail” dupioni! It’s been hard to represent the true color via pictures. After gazing a few more minutes at this luxurious feast for the eyes I got down to business:

I highly recommend a quilt design wall for your sewing room even if you’re not a quilter because you can hang up all your pattern pieces when you’re sewing clothes. Keeping track of these pieces was a headache until I tacked them up on the wall. Bonus: As you finish transferring markings fabric, you stack the used pattern pieces somewhere else and that way you don’t accidentally miss a piece and/or duplicate a piece. Renaissance picked out McCall’s #7091 for her dress, View D, and we’re also going to throw sleeves onto it because the church spring formal has a high level of dress standards (Read: No sleeveless dresses). Sleeves it is.

Happy news: If you didn’t use all of your cans of cranberry sauce and evaporated milk at Thanksgiving, they make fantastic pattern weights. THANK GOODNESS I WAS SICK ON MONDAY and spent the day perusing the internet—I stumbled across someone on some sewing website mentioning that you can’t use regular pins on silk because the holes will show. I do have silk pins that I wisely purchased and had set off to the side for a future silk project, so I busted those out and then used my canned goods to hold down the pattern pieces instead of pinning the pattern to the fabric for transferring.

I also stumbled across the advice to clip your princess seams BEFORE you pin them when sewing and dear goodness, what a difference! My muslin seams were done in the opposite fashion and they were horrific. These ones were almost easy after I applied that information.

Another piece of advice that I had forgotten until Monday was that you need to use a pressing cloth on silk. That wasn’t important until this morning when I actually started pressing stuff, but I had forgotten about it and mention it in case it’s helpful to anyone else.

I needed to order another yard of the dupioni because I forgot that View D was sleeveless and so its listed fabric requirement didn’t have the yardage to also cut out sleeves, and I failed to realize that when ordering. No major worries there, Silk Baron has already shipped it and it should be here soon. I still have the bodice lining and the contrast skirt to work on so I won’t be sitting around twiddling my thumbs as it makes its way to me.

So, as it stands, I have pieced the fashion fabric bodice and inserted the invisible zipper. Excellent progress! Not to where I had originally planned to be by this time, but it’s definitely moving along and I’m thankful for all the extra time I had available this week to work on it.

It absolutely cracks me up that those last two pictures are of the same area of the dress! How the light is hitting the fabric changes the color astronomically, I love it so much!

I don’t know how much time I’ll have to work on it over the weekend; it’s Daffodil Parades tomorrow and I’m not sure if I need to chaperone the marching band for all FOUR parades throughout the entire day. If not, I’ll be in my sewing room!

Spring Break Plans

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Woo hoo, it’s April! Smooth sailing ahead as winter releases its hold and we get to head into the lovely weather part of the year! Yay! This week is spring break for my kids, so we’re chilling at home with no plans to do much of anything, which is good because Nathaniel woke up on Monday morning with a 103 degree fever and he’s been camped out on the coach ever since, hacking out his lungs. This poor kid gets sick on every single school break. Sigh.

I’m late in publishing my plans for the week because Easter Sunday is a very busy day, Monday had me feeling rather poorly, and yesterday was our last good weather day in the forecast for this week so I spent it outside working on the yard. (Oh my goodness, that felt nice!)

We got all the trellises put up, planted some more veggies and flowers, and got the lawn weed-whacked and mowed so we could set up the badminton net. There’s still so much to do out there, but this big burst of work took care of the most pressing tasks. Whew!

But the weather is supposed to take a turn for the wet today, so I’m back inside focusing on the prom dresses, which sums up my plans for the rest of the week: SEW THE DRESSES.

So please excuse me for the shortness of this planning post, but I need to use my time on these dresses. I wish you all a lovely week!

We Made it to the End of March!

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It only occurred to me yesterday that this will be the last weekend of March. It’s so crazy how quickly this insanely long month flies by! We did it! Whew! I look back on all the concerts and music festivals, coupled with the gardening and the sewing—it’s such a BIG MONTH EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

Top priorities this past week:

  1. Prom Dresses!
  2. Garden
  3. Easter
  4. Girls’ driving practicing

Creativity

I’m still ironing out the wrinkles in Renaissance’s muslin for her prom dress. I look forward to the day when I’m good at making muslins. I’m on Attempt #3 and I’ve finally managed to get the worst problems solved. Now I just need to make sure the sleeve will work, which I’ve been procrastinating because sleeves and I do not get along. Fingers and toes crossed!

Gardening

No work done. I am falling behind on this. BUT it was raining all week, so…meh.

Easter

I’ve made no plans. Nobody’s terribly excited about any part of it this year, and we’ve all got other stuff going on, so I guess it’ll be a quiet celebration, which is fine to happen every few years.

Caring

  • Girls’ Driving Practice: Happened more than usual. Rachel drove Michael’s truck twice and she loves it.
  • Parent Teacher Conferences: I didn’t go because I am incapable of being in two places at once. I feel like I am always finding out about Parent Teacher Conferences only a week or two before they happen—I should make a note to figure this out earlier in the year so I don’t have previous engagements at the same time.
  • Lunch with a Friend: Happened! Oh, it’s such a nice thing to do! And, weirdly enough, a friend from Utah randomly phoned me about forty-five minutes before the lunch date and I got to talk to her, too! Connecting with friends is one of the best feelings. I’m so glad these ladies reached out.

Have a lovely Easter weekend!

A Pair of Pretty Purple Prom Dresses

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Renaissance and Rachel are both going to our church’s Spring Formal with their friends, and I decided to just throw sanity to the wind and make their dresses. I have been looking forward to making dance dresses ever since I found out Emily was a girl, but I’ve never been called upon to make dance dresses because right after Emily was asked to Spring Formal, the COVID shutdown went into place and everything was cancelled. She lost interest in school activities like that, even after things opened back up, and so she never went to any of the dances.

Ren and Rachel, however, are down with the whole formal dance thing and it’s been a lot of fun. I haven’t made any of their dresses yet because I was doing school and had no time for crafty pursuits, so I’m really grateful that I will get a chance to do these two dresses.

Renaissance’s Dress

I am wary of the pattern that she’s picked out because it’s got multiple princess seams all over the place, but if I can figure it out, it’s going to be gorgeous. I’ve already spent way too much time on her pattern because it was only available via PDF download and I had to print it out onto one hundred and twenty seven pieces of paper and then tape them together. It took four hours. I complained, bitterly, on Facebook and I was amazed at how many ride-or-die friends I have who joined me in my fury over the frustration of printing out this pattern.

A day or two later I was reading through Gertie’s newest book announcement on Instagram, and the inevitable comment kerfuffle over her decision to not include paper patterns with the book, when I noticed a comment about how you can send the A0 pattern files to a print center and have them printed out all nice and intact onto one huge sheet of paper like patterns normally come in when they’re sold in an envelope. I felt my heart slow and hiccup as I “remembered” that one of the options for printing out Ren’s dress pattern was A0, not A4 like I thought. And then I told all my friends at church about what an idiot I was.

But then I started writing this blog post and thought I should double-check that remembrance and NO, it was offered as an A4 size, not A0. I’m not an idiot!!! So…prior annoyance still stands. And yes, I do realize that the pattern is out of print and that’s why it’s only available as a PDF file…but really, I’d much rather it not have shown up in Renaissance’s internet searching for dress patterns if my only option was PDF. Something to remember for the future. Printed or A0 ONLY. None of this taping together of letter-sized papers for hours. Aaaand I need to go back to my church friends and recant my idiocy confession.

Ren’s dress is a contemporary pattern and will be sewn up in two different colors of silk—a color shifting indigo/purple dupioni called “Comet Tail,” and a solid orchid purple shantung called “Nolana,” both of which I purchased from Silk Baron. Oh my gosh, aren’t they the prettiest pieces of fabric?!?! I love to just hold them in my hands. And the lining is a gray silk/cotton batiste that I need to buy more of and turn into something I can use everyday because it is wonderful to touch and I need it in my life.

We have also purchased two rhinestone appliques to possibly attach to the dress, just in case the top of the bodice ends up looking too plain. AND I ordered silk thread to sew it all up, which is, weirdly, a really exciting thing for me because I’ve never ordered silk thread before. Whatever makes you happy, right?

Rachel’s Dress

She’s chosen a vintage pattern that just makes me shake my head because it’s so weird when you think about the dates of its publication and all sorts of other historical things that I’ll share with you later when it’s done. As with most republished vintage patterns, the actual sewing instructions are almost non-existent, so I’m guessing how some elements of this dress are going to go together and just hoping that my instincts are good. ‘Cuz that’s always an excellent recipe for success. (Some finger-crossing and optimistic-vibe-sending would be appreciated here…)

She’s picked out a lavender satin taffeta and a lilac organza from JoAnn Fabric that we picked up last weekend, and she’s hoping to add some sort of trim or applique to it. I think this particular dress will need the addition of some petticoats/crinolines to bring it to its full potential, so I’ve already ordered two to be safe. I was thinking I’d make them myself, but my timetable is super tight and I’d rather not stress about something like that.

And that’s where we are. Materials acquired and starting to add coal to the steam engine. Pretty soon we’ll be chugging along and I’ll have more to share with you