Dear Anne Adams

I have a complaint.  I spent hours last night on my vintage pattern entry, attaching the waistband piece to the top and bottom parts of the dress.   It's a painstaking process.  First fold in all the edges on the belt, on both inner and outer pieces then press them in place. Then pin them to the bodice part, adjusting the gathering in the back.  Machine baste that in place, dealing with the inevitable stretching of the non-interfaced top layer that makes the pointed ends not come together perfectly.  Then do the same for the bottom, which has no gathering and should fit perfectly ... hm.  I tried it on and yikes!  Even though the waist measurement given for my pattern is an inch bigger than my actual waist, I can barely get it around me.   So I'll have to re-draft a belt with an extra inch or two, pick all last night's work apart, and try again.  Anne Adams, how could you?

Actually, aside from the fact that I'm trying to meet the vintage pattern contest deadline (this Friday -- may sound like plenty of time to some of you but not for me, slow as I sew) I don't get all that upset about stuff like this anymore.  Ten years ago, I'd be reading Anne Adams the riot act, even if I had to exhume her to do it.   But now, no sweat really.  I like to sew ... I guess I'll be doing a little more of it on this dress than I thought.   I don't know if this change is maturity setting in, or merely that life has beaten me into submission.

I have to confess, another factor also impeded my progress this weekend, though more happily -- my husband surprised me with a new iMac for our upcoming anniversary!  My MacBook Pro is three and a half years old, and the hard drive has been pretty much full for the last three of those years, so I hadn't been able to upgrade my software, and was constantly shuffling my files to my backup drive.   Plus the display had weird lines on it from time to time.  Well that is over now, because the iMac has a freakin' TERABYTE of disk space, ten times what the old machine has.   And the bright, beautiful screen, the spiffy new software ... yay!   The only blip in the process was that the first one we brought home had a busted display, but we exchanged it at the Apple store with no hassle the next day.

Anyhow, I did make some progress on the dress this weekend that I won't need to un-do.  The bodice is done, the skirt is done, and while the belt do-over will be time-consuming, after that is just hemming and buttons and buttonholes.  I think I can finish in time, barring no further catastrophes, either in sewing or in life.   One thing I have already noticed that I'm not going to like about this dress is that interfacing the neck edge with actual interfacing (instead of just fabric) could be a problem, in that it reduces drape in that part and you can tell.  Of course, that might have been a side effect of having the bad waistband pinned super-tight around my actual waist, whereas I actually aim for a smidge below that when I sew, so that I don't look so freakishly high-waisted.   There's no removing the interfacing at this point, so I'll just have to cross my fingers and hope this is yet another thing to blame on that dastardly waistband.