The great experiment in learning to sew is coming along nicely! In the past 3 weeks, I've made myself six or seven summer tops and two new dresses. I ended up taking elements of both the patterns I bought and making up my own pattern. On one top, I made so many mistakes that I told Jay the piece was unsalvageable. Then, I dreamed what to do to salvage it. I persevered and ended up with a top that fits. At the moment, it's white but I think that if I dye it navy, the mistakes will be so hard to see that it will actually be wearable.
After I'd made all those tops, I decided it was time to try for the main goal: a new dress. The plan was to make a new summer dress of pale blue linen to go with a fun, light weight shawl I'd gotten at Marshall's. Before I was ready to tackle that though, I had to make sure that I had the pattern down correctly. So, I pulled out some gorgeous linen I've had for decades (bought it the last time I decided to learn to sew and didn't use it before the muse abandoned me), and made a trial dress out of that. I learned several important lessons on that dress. First, slow down. Pushing the machine to go too fast will screw up the thread. Second, don't be lazy: cut the pieces in an efficient manner, even if it means turning the fabric around. If I'd done that, I'd have had a large enough piece of fabric left over to make another top. Third, measure repeatedly. Try the piece on as you go. Fourth, try it on again before doing any top stitching. Finally, I learned that even if you screw up everything else, sometimes you can still fix the piece if you just keep going. The first dress needs a little bit of tailoring before I can wear it but it came out well enough to encourage me to tackle the main goal.
So Tuesday evening, I cut out the pattern I'd come up with and set to work. It's the same basic pattern as all the tops I've made and I can crank out one of those in about 2 hours now. I'd spent the entire day with #6, who is just a bundle of cuteness but I was rather tired by 7 p.m. and I know better than to try to make anything when I'm tired so I didn't try to finish it all in one go. Wednesday morning I had a few hours so that's when I put most of it together. All the lessons I'd learned came in pretty handy and I'm happy to say I ran into no big problems. I didn't quite finish it, as I had to pick up BoopityBoop from summer Bible Camp and they spent the afternoon and evening with me. We had a blast but sewing was not on our agenda. To give you an idea of how busy we were, baking cookies was in the plan and we never got around to it. This morning, I was finally able to do the last, finishing bits on my new dress. Weirdly, the hem took longer than the rest of the dress. Not because it was a tricky hem but my needle broke! I wasn't even sure I had any more needles for my machine but fortunately, I did. It took a while to find the directions on how to switch out the needle but they were pretty simple. Then of course, I couldn't get the old, broken needle out, even after I'd loosened (removed) the screw that holds it in. I was able to wiggle that old thing until it fell out and the new needle went in slick and easy. The machine directions said one should switch out the needle fairly often, as a bent or dull needle could cause problems. I thought "whoa; this new needle should make putting the hem in a snap!"
Wrong.
Turns out, the new needle's attitude was "I don't work with amateurs." Despite rethreading the machine very carefully, my thread broke every two inches. All the way along the hem, it was stitch, snap, rethread, stitch, snap, rethread...I'm very sure the problem is user error but I have no idea what I was doing wrong. Doesn't matter; by lunchtime I'd finally managed to finish hemming the dress. If I'd hemmed it by hand, I'd have finished an hour earlier.
But noon was soon enough: I'm wearing it to a fancy pants garden party at the Arboretum tonight! I'm excited: I've been there when parties were being set up and I've been kicked out when parties were about to begin but I've never actually attended any events thrown at the Arb, which is the best Arboretum in the world, hands down, no contest. Yes, I have been to Versailles.
One of the things BoopityBoop and I did manage to accomplish was buying flowers for my secret backyard. I have to go water them. The Canadian smoke wafting down from the North is drying everything out. But ooh, the sunsets are beautiful!