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!