WIP Wednesday, the one with garden parties

GENERAL THINGSTechnically it's Thursday, but I only got back yesterday and promptly had to log in to work to get some stuff done. Anyway, it's been a week of much things done (although not necessarily things I wanted progressed) and today is a public holiday (ANZAC Day) so I have time to type this up as I didn't yesterday. It might still be Wednesday in Hawaii or West of it.

 

DRESSMAKING

BEHOLD the dress I made for the Bridgerton Garden Party (hosted by Netflix at an exclusive resort in country NSW):

It's pattern Simplicity S9434, but I extended  the bodice all around the waistline because my bust is bigger than the model size, adjusted the back so it fit me personally, and made it with tulip-sleeves instead of the puff sleeves that were the chief option.

I also ended up making it in quiting cotton (Joel Dewberry's Notting Hill range) and the skirts are cotton voile.

 

It worked really well, I think. A good style, very 'Bridgerton'.

I also had a second dress: this one I 'made' from secondhand clothing: one '1970s style hippie' dress, all loose and flowy, and one mandarin-collar jacket from HK brand 'Wanko'. I sewed the 'belt loops' for the tie higher - right under the bust, and shortened the jacket so that it's more like a Regency-style spencer.

All in all, I and my real-life peeps like what I've done. But pretty much everyone in Bowral was indifferent. Ah well. Now I have a regency dress if anyone I know happens to have another garden party!

Or, you know, I could wear it to the next frocktails event!

 

SEWING:

Today (Thursday) I sewed up a couple of zippered bags which have been lying around for at least a couple of months - since the Blue Mountains Frocktails. Well, one of them has been around for at least a year, I think - I've had it since one of the Sydney Frocktails, I'm sure - while the other one I got in the BM Frocktails goodybag.

I lined one with patchworked scraps of linen - also from the BM Frocktails goodybag, and the other with some more Joel Dewberry Notting Hill print, although I think this one I had saved for handkerchiefs.

 

BINDING:

I have finally - FINALLY - made a teeny tiny squidge of progress on binding. I've cut up some more strips for binding, and was fully intending to sew them together today and make the binding and...I got distracted. It's 8:30pm and I'm out of energy, so no binding.

 

PIECING:

And while I was in Bowral, on Sunday afternoon I finished sewing another column of stars to the Restless Hands of Sel quilt.

Quite cutely, a little girl and her family wandered by and wanted to know what I was doing. Her mother encouraged her to ask, and so we had a little talk about making quilts and what I was doing and how it was made.

 

THOUGHTS I HAD

Finally picked up the four quilts that my quilting group made in the years before COVID and delivered them to my mother, who is going to raffle them off for her charity organisation to donate the money. My quilting group always intended to raffle them off, we just haven't had the time to get it all organised and happening. Mum's charity does this every year, they offer a bevy of prizes, and people love winning the quilts that I or my group have made.

I'll post pics of them another time.