Rachel’s Vintage Purple Prom Dress (Vogue 2001)

May 16, 2024May 16, 2024Leave a comment

When Rachel picked the Vogue 2001 pattern for her prom dress, I was elated! I love me a vintage pattern, and thankfully, so does she. I wasn’t sure she’d actually go through with the idea when push came to shove, so I was incredibly pleased that she was committed to some vintage glamour for her first prom.

Pattern

Vogue #2001, only released from the archives this spring. It’s a reprint of a 1941 pattern, and the first time she pointed it out to me I squinted at it because it really looked like a 1930s top smashed up with a 1950s skirt. I actually said, “That top and that skirt don’t go together, what is going on here?!” And then I saw the 1941 publication date and immediately thought about World War 2 fabric rationing and how this pattern did not fit into that idea whatsoever. But then my husband and I figured out that Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941, so American patterns were not adopting a “war rationing” mindset until 1942, probably. I wonder how many women purchased the pattern with the intent to make it and then couldn’t make it because of rationing?

Fabric

Rachel picked out a lavender satin taffeta and a lilac organza from JoAnn Fabric. We needed 11 yards of both because the main eater of yardage in this pattern is the skirt, which is ginormous AND cut double. The pattern doesn’t have instructions for two layers of skirt, but it’s what we wanted to do, so I overcast the waistline of them together and then treated it as one skirt.

Notions

Thread: Good ol’ Coats & Clark Dual Duty All Purpose #3440. I bought two out of caution, even though I never use the second spool, but I did actually need the second spool on this dress.
Zipper: The last lilac-colored invisible zipper in my weird assortment of cast-offs that I ordered from Amazon years ago.
Horsehair Braid: The solid main fabric skirt has a 3-inch horsehair braid in its hem. The circumference of each skirt is 528 inches, so I used almost fifteen yards of horsehair braid. The pattern called for 4-inch horsehair braid, but I had purchased the 3-inch braid years ago on Amazon for a “just in case” moment, and decided to go with that.

Time Spent

I DID actually keep track of how much time I worked on this! I wasn’t able to get to working on this dress until a week before the dance, so I made the decision to “live update” my progress to my friends on Facebook—at the end of every hour of working on the dress I’d snap a picture and type out what I’d accomplished as a comment to that day’s Facebook post about the dress construction. I knew that the public accountability would help me stay focused and have a shot at sewing this up in a week. Little did I know, my Facebook friends started cheering me on and leaving me uplifting comments as well, which really buoyed my spirits as I toiled away in my craft room. I will absolutely use this method of social pressure to help me finish big projects in the future!

Muslin: I wasn’t tracking hours while working on the muslin, so I estimate it took about five hours.
Sewing: 39 hours, according to my Facebook posts.
Total: ~44 hours

Highlights

The fact that Rachel picked out a vintage pattern just made me so happy!
The Facebook live updates and the cheering from friends made this so much more enjoyable to construct.
I did French seams on as much of this as I could and the seams are just so beautiful inside this dress.
I was able to do that whole dart rotation maneuver and transfer some annoying fullness in the upper arm and shoulder area into the bust gathers. I did a new thing and it totally worked!
The narrow hemming of the sheer layer is, by far, the best job I’ve ever done on narrow hemming. I enjoyed that step.
I did cheater gathering with a length of yarn for each quadrant of skirt and it worked beautifully. Highly recommended.

Lowlights

The side seams of the skirts are too short, despite having measured the skirt on her to the ground, so her petticoat showed a little bit. No idea how this happened. Very annoyed.
Kimono sleeves are stupid. That is all.
Holy skirts, Batman! Cutting out the skirt sections was a logistical concern. No matter where I went in my house there wasn’t enough room to lay it out in one run so I had to shift the fabric and pattern for each skirt to continue marking it. That brought some challenges, but I got through it.
I bought a hooped petticoat to go underneath this and even had Rachel try it all on with the hooped petticoat, but she hated how it felt to have the skirts held away from her legs and refused to wear it. Which was too bad because I think the skirt was more impressive with the hooped petticoat beneath it. She ended up going with a tulle petticoat and a flounced petticoat over the tulle to smooth things out.

I really love this dress and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to make it for my girl. We bought a book that showed how to do 1940s makeup and hair so she could go with the complete 1940s vibe. She did her makeup beautifully, and I am not known for my hairstyling skills so the hair was a little less than hoped for, but whatever, it worked…enough.

Renaissance informed me that Rachel’s dress was a star of the show the entire night. Girls were coming up to her over and over again to exclaim how much they loved her dress and how it was like a fairytale princess gown and how much they wished they had one like it. Now that I know how much work goes into constructing those precious princess ballgown skirts, I get why they’re not offered in your typical off-the-rack dance dresses. Whew! I’m glad she got to feel special at the dress in her dress! Who knows, the trauma may wear off just enough by next year for me to consider making another one for her…

Links to all posts about Rachel’s Vintage Purple Prom Dress

Renaissance’s Celestial Purple Prom Dress (McCall’s 7091)

May 14, 20241 Comment

Alright, as promised, a debriefing on Renaissance’s prom dress:

Pattern

McCall’s #7091, discontinued but available online as a PDF file.

Caution: It’s a batch of three downloads with up to sixty pages in each download that you have to tape together. An A0 printing option is NOT available. It took me four hours to tape the one hundred and twenty-seven pages together.

Materials

Dupioni Silk in colorway “Comet Tail” (5 yards), Shantung Silk in colorway “Nolana” (4 yards), and Batiste Silk/Cotton in colorway “Apparition” (2 yards). All three were purchased from Silk Baron.

Working with silk is a lovely experience. I opted to do all of my cutting of the fabrics with a pinked rotary blade in order to cut down on fraying, and that was an excellent choice.

I will not use the Batiste Silk/Cotton as a lining in the future because it has too loose of a weave and stretched and grew like crazy inside the dress, causing the neckline to sag more and more as Renaissance wore it. It’s a beautiful fabric and I want to make more things from it in the future, but it’s not well-suited to give structure to a garment.

Notions

Thread: Aurifil 50 weight #2780 when piecing “Comet Tail,” Superior Threads’ Pima 50 weight #8035 when piecing “Nolana,” and I used Coats & Clark Dual Duty XP All Purpose #3510 for piecing the “Apparition” gray lining. Ren used an invisible monofilament thread (that she hasn’t put back so I can’t tell you for certain who makes it) for securing the rhinestone appliques.
Zipper: I used a light purple invisible zipper from my zipper drawer, still leftover from the ill-advised purchase of the “scrap bag” of invisible zippers that really only included colors that I’ll rarely ever use. I used blue Sharpie on the zipper pull to camouflage it against the Comet Tail silk.
Rhinestones: We bought two rhinestone appliques “Devine Pair Applique LA-11” from Planet Rhinestone on Etsy, and a loose pack of various sizes of rhinestones from Amazon.

I originally planned to use silk thread for sewing this all up, but read online that it was a bad idea and that silk thread should really only be used for embroidery and the like. So I went with cotton.

Renaissance spent all of her free time in the week leading up Church Prom attaching the appliques, and Emily, Ren, and I spent a frenzied two hours on the day of Church Prom gluing the loose gems to the dress with Beacon Gem-Tac adhesive and toothpicks.

Time Spent

Assembling the pattern: 4 hours
Sewing the dress: My memory is fuzzy on this, but I feel like it was five weeks’ worth of sewing a few hours a day. My estimate is forty hours of work? All those princess seams took a long time to assemble, and I handstitched the contrast skirt’s hem.
Rhinestone application: Renaissance estimates that it took at least ten hours to sew the two appliques onto the dress. It was her first time doing something like that. And then three of us worked for two hours together to glue the loose rhinestones on, so 3 x 2 = 6 hours.
Total: ~60 hours of work

Highlights

First time working with silk and it was awesome! I ended up phoning Silk Baron to get advice on whether or not to wash the fabric before sewing and whoever answered the phone was incredibly friendly and took their time in explaining the situations where it would be ok and why this was not one of those situations because the dye and the shot weave would lose their coolness factors.
There is only one pucker in all of those princess seams! I really learned how to ease fabric with this dress. I’m a fabric-easing machine now. The trick is to cut the notches before you pin.
The lighter purple contrast skirt was assembled using French seams, which was the first time I’d done them and they turned out great.
Watching Renaissance work on sewing the rhinestone appliques to her dress while watching “The Simpsons.”
Working with Emily & Renaissance to glue the gemstones onto the dress. I always like family group projects.

Lowlights

Taping the pattern together. Seriously, McCall’s, you need to offer an A0 printing option. A lot of sewing happens on a deadline and having to spend four hours upfront taping paper together is brutal.
Owing to my background as a quilter, I default to a shorter stitch length when I’m nervous about a seam. It turns out that this is not the correct default when sewing clothing. My choice to go with a shorter stitch length on the two skirt hemlines resulted in bunchy edge finishes, which no one really noticed except myself. The swoopy hem could have laid down so much nicer if I’d realized that. I did redo the hem on the lowest part of the swoop because it had to be trimmed, but didn’t have time to do the upper portion.
I also wonder if I should have used a thin horsehair braid on the swoopy hem in order to make it stand out more? When the silk was fresh the swoop skirt stood out in beautiful rounded columns, but by the time it was finished it had gotten limp and didn’t do that anymore.
The lining grew a lot and the neckline sagged more and more as she wore it.

Lowlights aside, I am monstrously pleased with this dress! It had twenty-nine separate pieces to assemble because it was a twelve panel princess seam dress, and I made it work! It was beautiful plain and it was beautiful with the rhinestone embellishments. It makes a beautiful swishing noise when she’s moving in it. It’s just a beautiful dress and she loved it and I’d totally do it all over again.

Note: She is wearing a crinoline with the dress to help the skirt stand out more. I think it was this one. Or it could have been this one. I bought both and each girl wore one of them and I can’t remember who had which one.

Links to all posts about Renaissance’s Prom Dress

Church Spring Formal 2024

May 12, 2024May 13, 20242 Comments

I did manage to finish Rachel’s dress in time—11:30 that morning, to be exact—and Renaissance was able to finish adding bling to her dress—at 3:00pm that day, after a two hour gem-gluing session with Emily, herself and me—so all the dress dreams became a reality for the Church Spring Formal. I threw their hair into some updos, fretted over shoes and petticoats, and we were on our way! Their dates looked great, and I think everyone had a good time. We had dinner at my granny and aunt’s house because it was near the dance and we knew that Granny would love to see the dresses. It was a nice evening.

And now, I think I’m going to take a little break from my sewing machine…it’s been a wild two months of non-stop sewing! I’m so pleased with how they turned out and so glad that my girls liked them. Happy memories.

Prom Dress Crunch Time 2.0

May 10, 20241 Comment

I am so sorry that I have not been updating for the past two weeks, but I had to get going on Rachel’s prom dress for the church spring formal, which is taking place this weekend. It has been NON-STOP SEWING around here, often taking 8-10 hours a day of focused construction on this beast of a dress! I have had no time for anything else—the girls have been making dinners and I am running low on clean clothes, my friends! But it’s coming together, it is GORGEOUS and we are getting close to being done. I’ll be back next week with spring formal pictures and, hopefully, detailed posts about both the Celestial Purple Prom Dress (which friends named the “Swoopy Mermaid Dress”) AND the Vintage Purple Prom Dress (which I have named the “Lilac Behemoth” because the skirt on this thing, guys…wow.

I am currently in the midst of flipping the horsehair braid under the skirt and sewing it down, and then all I have left to worry about is the side zipper. I was hoping I could add some embellishments to the bodice, but I think I’m going to run out of time on that aspiration. There’s going to be A LOT of sewing happening in the next twenty-four hours! I was so jazzed when Rachel picked out Vogue 2001 because, FINALLY, a vintage dress pattern! What I failed to recognize was the sheer mass of skirt this thing has and how much time would be needed to just cut the skirts out. Well, that, and the fact that I threw a sheer overskirt into the mix as well…there’s twenty-two yards of fabric in those skirts combined. The skirt circumference on this thing is 528 inches. Big skirt. Super big skirt. Insanity of the highest degree. And then multiply that by two. Go big or go home. See you in a few days with spring formal pics!

Prom 2024

April 28, 2024October 29, 20244 Comments

The big day has come and gone and Renaissance’s dress was finished the evening before and Rachel’s backup dress actually fit. Success! Oh, they looked beautiful. My baby girls went and got all grown up.

They had a great time at prom, and it was wonderful watching them be excited for and enjoying the evening. My heart is full.

I’ll post details on Renaissance’s dress in the next few days.

Spring Break Prom Dress Progress

April 5, 20241 Comment

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!

A Pair of Pretty Purple Prom Dresses

March 27, 2024March 25, 20242 Comments

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

Cake, Silks & Pi(es)

March 17, 2024March 19, 2024Leave a comment

I feel like it was a really productive week, which is always nice. My little routine of writing these goals vs. outcomes weekly posts is helping me stay on-track with what I want to accomplish each week. I’m really glad I’ve reinstituted these. Not only are they keeping me focused, but I really enjoy writing them and re-reading them, like a journal. I rarely re-read my handwritten journals, so I don’t learn as much from my writing in those. Blog posts can actually be searched by keyword, for cryin’ out loud. Wonderful.

Top priorities this last week:

Michael’s birthday
Garden
WREF Scholarship application
Prom dresses
Resurrecting music practice time

Celebrating

Michael’s birthday went well, there was an adorable “Among Us wedding cake” made by Renaissance, and each of the kids remembered to get him a gift this year. We did not have steak and potatoes for dinner, as I predicted; he requested fajitas.
The potentially brewing project died a sure death this past week. I’m bummed because it would have been a cool thing to do, but I’m also relieved because it was going to take a lot of time and effort to pull off. Many lessons were learned from this experience that I can apply in the future when such a situation inevitably pops up again.

Gardening

Trellises are in my house, as are some other gardening items.
All seeds needed through the month of April have been secured.
Rhubarb is still small.
I did sow the cabbages, some alyssum, but nothing else.
My sweet peas are just barely starting to sprout! You really have to look for them, but tiny little tendrils are pushing out of the soil!

Community

Renaissance did indeed submit her application for the WREF scholarship! Oh gosh, the arrhythmias…she submitted it yesterday at 2:15pm or so, and the pop-up that came up to confirm submission stated that it was due by 4pm that day. We had planned to work on it that evening, but something came up and we moved the time to earlier, THANK GOODNESS.
Band Parent meeting went well and many things have been scheduled for this last push of the school year. I still have a few office-y things to do for that.

Creativity

At Home:
- Fat Quarter Shop upcoming quilt: Sneak peek video was posted on Friday on Instagram and I’m aware that my videography skills/software need an upgrade. I had planned to finish piecing the top on Saturday and even cleared my whole schedule for it, but some of my children decided to mutiny against their Saturday chores and much time was lost on this quilt because it went towards dialoguing and disciplining. I’m still confused as to why that day went so sideways. As it stands, I’m about 2/3 of the way done with assembling the blocks.
- Prom Dresses: The fabric for Ren’s dress has arrived and I am so in love with it. It’s GORGEOUS. The contrast fabric isn’t as flowy as I would have liked, but we’ll just have to make do because it was the only kind of silk they had that came in the color we wanted. FYI, Shantung silk is not flowy. Tell your friends.

Van Crafting Sessions™: Designing wedding shawls: Newsflash: I’ve not done this before and I’m not good at it. Yet. (#growthmindset) Time was spent wrapping my head around how to actually do this.
Resurrecting music practice sessions: Did not happen because I’ve had them scheduled for the evenings, but now that it’s light outside again we’re actually outside during that time as a family. I’ll need to figure out a different time of day for this.

It was a really, really busy week with a concert on Thursday, which was also Pi Day, so Emily made three pies and because we had three pies chilling at our house I invited Ren’s band friends over after the concert and we all ate pie until 11:15pm. Ha ha. I’m generally an introvert who really appreciates a solid sleep schedule and bedtime, but sometimes you just gotta spend some time with friends. It was a good choice, despite how tired it made me the next day.

Much Music and Considerable Clothing Commissions

March 10, 2024March 19, 2024Leave a comment

It was a week of excess; a week that seemed overwhelming in the beginning and then ended with a smorgasbord of new opportunities on top of an overfilled plate.

Community

All the music went well. The All-District Choir Concert was really, really good; it was the first time they’ve done that concert since 2016 and it really is a special event to see every single choir student in the district performing together in one space.

Wind Ensemble (High School Band) performed at the PLU Invitational on Friday and I went along as a chaperone. They did so good! It was a really enjoyable day hanging out with some of my favorite people.

Jazz Bands (both middle and high school) performed at a swing dance last night. I wasn’t feeling well, so I didn’t go. Michael took good videos and everyone sounded really good.

Clothing

There was a lot of laundry folding, but I’m still not caught up.

I thought a lot about spring, Easter and choir trip wardrobes.

But then Prom was announced and I remembered that it really is a big deal to me to make the girls’ dresses for the high school dances, so everything else has kind of gone out of the window. I almost get my wish of making 1950s spring formal dresses—Rachel is eyeing a vintage Vogue pattern from the 1940s, so close enough. Renaissance’s pattern choice is a gamble that I think is going to work out. I am really excited about both dresses. Since it’s Ren’s senior year, I’ll be making hers from really nice fabrics, and Rachel will have to make do with Casa Collection satin from JoAnn Fabric. I cannot wait for the patterns to arrive in the mail so I can start cranking out the muslins.

Creativity

The Baking Doodle Cowl pattern was finally released on Friday, and there were many nice comments about my particular test knit. Always feels good to receive a compliment.

My knitting queue has been a whirlwind of indecision this week! I spent a lot of time narrowing down a new project and decided to go with finally using a gorgeous skein of spring green laceweight yarn to make a pretty spring shawl. Then I decided it’d look great if I carried a strand of self-striping green mohair with it. I was so excited, and then, after knitting the set-up chart, decided it did not look great.

Which is fine because then I realized that we are in the years where my girls can start getting married, which was brought on by receiving an invitation to the wedding of one of Emily’s friends, which led to some deep discussions about weddings, heirlooms, and traditions, and now I feel like I need to get working on wedding shawls so I can have them already made because LDS engagements are really, really short and I know that I will not have enough time to make their wedding shawls when the time comes.

So I sat down to figure out what patterns I want to use for their shawls and inevitably came to the conclusion that I really just want to design an individual shawl for each girl that weaves together meaningful stitch patterns and symbolism that will carry special meaning for them. SO…I’m going to spend the next few Van Crafting Sessions™ researching and drafting shawl patterns. Which is pretty cool.

Gardening

I accomplished nothing, NOTHING in the garden this last week. Michael and I have started watching the series “Homegrown,” which is about transforming people’s backyards into sustainable gardening spaces, so I’m technically doing research. I learned about mushroom logs! I could grow something in the shady parts of the yard! Except that my family despises mushrooms!

Celebrating

There’s potentially a new project brewing. I won’t say more because I honestly do not know if it’s going to materialize. It would be amazing if it does, but also a ton of work. So I won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t happen. I would regret the missed opportunity, though. More on that if it gets the green light.

Caring

After months of discussing the possibility, we finally have officially started playing a weekly campaign of Dungeons & Dragons on Monday nights. Michael and I are NOT D&Ders, but somehow all four of our kids love the game. We’ve been struggling to have Family Home Evenings for years, but suddenly it’s not difficult to gather everyone. Hopefully the trend continues.

I was subbing one day last week and one of the teachers actually asked me how our family’s new game night was going. Apparently my kids are really talking about it to anyone who will listen. Whatever works, right? Turns out it’s figuring out how to battle fantasy monsters in Steampunk Victorian England. Feel free to tell your friends.

How to Plan a Birthday Dress

April 11, 2021April 11, 2021Leave a comment

I mentioned in my last post that I’m going to sew myself a dress for my birthday. I mentioned it for various reasons, most of them being that if I say out loud, I’ll feel like I need to actually do it, and by saying it’s for my birthday, it also gives me a deadline and I just can’t seem to function without a deadline breathing down my neck.

Do you get project paralysis when you’ve got a blank canvas in front of you? Too many choices, so you can’t actually narrow down what the heck you’re going to do? This is totally me, and I find that it works best to take any limitations into account, because limitations help hone your choices by booting out the choices that simply won’t work.

So, we have a time limitation with the birthday deadline: Saturday, May 8th (Not my birthday, but I want the dress done for the Sunday before my birthday) which gives me roughly four weeks. In all honesty, my creative brain totally thinks I’m going to be done with this in a week. My logic brain is worried I don’t actually have enough time to finish this because hi, it’s spring (gardening), school sports are starting up again for some of my kids, I have another secret project that’s going to be taking up a lot of my times, and OH YEAH I HAVE FOUR KIDS. (The four kids yelling thing is something my BFF keeps stage-yelling at me every time I get down on myself for not being “more productive.” I’m supposed to now always yell it whenever I’m thinking of things that I need to take into consideration when thinking about starting new projects, according to her.)

The fabric: Kokka Natural Garden Voile, purchased from Miss Matatabi during a sale in December. I have a rule that if I gasp *out loud* because a fabric or yarn is so beautiful, that I really need to figure out how to buy some. I gasped at this, saw it was on sale, and bought the rest of it. Not sorry at all. STALKS OF LAVENDER, people! SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

Another limitation is the amount of fabric I have for this dress: 4 3/8 yards (8 meters). I know that seems like a lot of fabric, but it’s not because a) I am a full skirt addict, and b) I’m a plus-size gal with a lot going on up top. Of course, I want to do a beautiful circle or pleated skirt that swooshes around, but I just don’t have the yardage for it. I think I’m going to have to go with an A-Line skirt, which isn’t my favorite…but I can’t fight the reality of yardage amounts. It was end-of-bolt, so I got what I could get, and there’s nothing else I can do about it.

Two other limitations: Modesty (Has to have sleeves and hit below the knee), and I don’t really want to spend any more money on extras for this. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to line this because it is voile, but I’m hoping I already have something on-hand for that. I might buy 1/2-1 yard of a coordinating fabric, if my heart gets set on a contrast extra, like a Peter Pan collar, or cuffs, or a midriff section or something like that.

I haven’t made myself a dress in quite some time, and my measurements have changed a lot since then, so it might be a good idea to keep things simple–basic bodice, short sleeves, a-line skirt. There’ll need to be something extra, but I’m not quite sure what that’s going to be just yet. I’d like this dress to be prettily functional; nice enough for church, and not too nice for wearing to the grocery story on days where I want to be cute as I go about my errands.

OK…that’s not too tough. I’ve done it before! (Let’s just hope it doesn’t take me close to year to get it done like I did with the last one, k?)

Goals for this week: