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!