Summer Dress, Take 2

Last summer I bought patterns and fabric for 3 separate summer dresses. I had gotten the feeling that my wardrobe was lacking in that area, and living in Louisiana as I do (I live south of I-10; that means I'm truly Southern, right?), adequate summer clothing is a necessity.

However, I didn't make the sort of fast progress on them that I had hoped. In fact, I ran into such roadblocks that I almost gave up entirely! I began my first dress, a spaghetti-strapped number with a gathered bodice and a flared knee-length skirt in beige, only to find that it was WAY too big for me! The bodice made any alterations seem rather daunting, and the poor unfinished piece sits folded in my closet for the day I gain 75 pounds (May that day never, NEVER come).

I began the next dress more optimistically. It is a halter-topped dress with, again, a flared knee-length skirt. The pattern is pictured below:



The fabric is a blue calico with an off-white flowery swirly pattern. The off-white swirls have a gradient of sorts, and in places turn darker to a pale-ish goldenrod. This is probably difficult to see in photos, but I am constantly looking down at my dress thinking I spilled something on it, only to realize it's actually part of the dye scheme. Ha.

Here is the partially finished version of the dress:


Unfortunately this dress also turned out RIDICULOUSLY too large for me, but fortunately the pattern lent itself better to easy alterations. 6 inches of tucks later, it fit reasonably well!

Now I always like to throw in a little personalization on each piece of clothing that I make, since I consider myself as more of a designer than a seamstress, and of course I NEED to express the uniqueness of HollyBEE in all of my creations. When I purchased the materials for this dress, I also purchased 3 yards of 4" wide satin ribbon in cream to sew above the hem of the dress. The ribbon is wired and edged with faux seed pearls, and looked like a perfect complement to the fabric's palette:


But when it came down to it, I really didn't like the final look of the ribbon over the hem (which looks a lot whiter due to the camera flash). And when I looked at myself in the mirror, I really knew where it needed to go.

The bodice of the dress looked much more well-defined in the pattern illustrations above, due to the benefits of watercolor shading, and my own semi-final product seemed rather lacking.

So I took the ribbon, rearranged it a bit, and in the end decided to use it in a flattering pattern around the bodice area of the dress to give it the something that was missing.


After removing the pieces of wire from the beaded edging that were poking into me, it turned out just the way I wanted it to! I was so pleased with it, I wore it to my dear friends' Anisa & Snowflake's wedding last week for its debut. This was an interesting opposite-coincidence, as the one time I decide to wear blue, the entire wedding party was decked out in red. There was one square dance in particular, where I happened to be surrounded by 5 members of the wedding party and another couple wearing outfits in the "red family" and I stuck out like a sore thumb for my blue dress. I must have done that on purpose by accident I swear!

Here is a photo I was able to wheedle out of the exhausted bride and groom at the end of the reception.


I would also like to thank the lovely Anisa for essentially being the inspiration for me to start this blog. She has a wonderful blog of all of her knitting projects, and is probably the most talented knitter I have ever met (grandmothers excluded, naturally). In fact, one of the only reasons I felt adequate enough to start a blog much like she has is because I do not knit and thus I feel like comparing our talents is as comparing apples to kumquats.

So thank you, Anisa, and MANY CONGRATULATIONS!
Love,
Holly

P.s. Congratulations as well to Snowflake, who although does not knit, is a great aficionado and also a great friend of mine. I am sooo happy for you both!

In The Beginning

My first attempt at lace crochet was a "Scalloped Edge" lace that I found in a book called The Complete Guide to Thread Crochet by Rita Weiss. The book is very useful for me, since it's pictorial diagrams of all the different types of stitches are easy to understand at 3 o'clock in the morning when I'm half-catatonic from the lack of sleep due to coming off of night shift on the rig, and I can't for the life of me remember how to do a slipknot.

Unfortunately, the instructions they give for various projects seem to be riddled with mistakes and typos. I sat with my mom for hours back in March trying to decipher what they were telling me to do. This was only possible if my mother read the instructions, tried to work through the mistakes in their directives, and then perform the crocheting herself. I would watch what she did and make occasionally successful attempts to replicate it myself.

But my vacation ended and I went home to Louisiana, where I no longer had my mother to show me what to do. Perhaps this would have been a good time to get a webcam?

I was sent offshore in April (which you can read about here), and although I brought my crocheting with me and occasionally took it out of its bag, I made not a single stitch in the weeks I was there. After a long stretch on the rig, I came home and decided I wasn't going to do anything work-related for a week. So because I wasn't forced to be awake during the day, I had no impetus to switch off my night-shiftedness, and through mere inertia I remained a night-owl for nearly a week and a half. I quickly realized that the Scalloped Edging was a lost cause, for there was no way I was going to be able to continue it on my own.

And thus began a crocheting marathon, and the project which I cut my teeth on. I spent the ensuing nights on the "Simplicity Doily"; perhaps a misguided idea since it also came from the same book notorious for the poor instructions. The doily is shown in the bottom left picture on the cover.

The nights continued slowly, as I would struggle through row after row of the project, occasionally trying to guess what the author actually meant to say, and often completely bewildered at what I was actually supposed to accomplish. In comes Mom to the rescue again! I would work until I was completely stuck, and then wait for 5am Eastern Standard Time (4am for me in Louisiana), at which point I would call up my mother and explain my dilemma. After describing the dilemma, we would have a long discussion about what the instructions said, what I thought they meant, and what the picture looked like, and eventually I would have a reasonable approximation of what I was supposed to do. The rest of the early morning hours would continue like that, with my mother receiving about 2-3 calls daily. I would go to bed sometime around 12pm, sleep till evening, and make one more quick phone call before my mom went to bed and I continued on my project.

The employees at blockbuster started to recognize my car as it pulled up when I would make daily visits to rent the next season of Desperate Housewives, or whatever other TV series was providing background entertainment for my crocheting that night. Eventually, I finished!! I actually completed a crocheting project!

It only took me another month or so to go out and buy the stainless steel pins I needed to block it. Here is what it looked like while blocked:

Unfortunately the foam piece that I bought to provide the base for blocking was too thin for the fully stretched-out doily, and I sort of fudged the edges. I'll probably re-block it again one of these days (which probably translates to roughly a year from now). I used a stiffening solution at half-concentration, mostly as a test of the solution itself. And here is the final result of the doily, adorning my dining room table.

I might still revisit the abandoned Scalloped Edging now that I have gained sufficient proficiency in lace-making such that my mother rarely gets the early-morning calls from me anymore. It looked lovely in the picture and would make a perfect edging for a handkerchief.