We’re officially one week into Frocktober… and I’m wearing pants. Unfortunately I have to travel for a family funeral, and spending the next 24 hours in a dress just doesn’t seem optimal. I’ll tack on an extra couple days into November to make up for it.

In happier news, I am more than halfway to my fundraising goal! My donation page is showing $1,050 total against my target of $2,000. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far! The Ovarian Cancer Research Fund is a fantastic organisation and every dollar helps.

My sewing is necessarily going to have to pause while I’m away, but I did make more progress. I finished sticking together the shirtdress pattern and cut out my size. I also started sewing together my bias cut Hawaiian dress. I managed to get the bodice complete, as well as the front of the skirt. (Note that the ruching along the front is temporary via some basting threads. It’ll look better when it’s properly finished.)

And with that, I’m off!

Still no actual sewing to be seen. Tonight I washed 8m of bemsilk lining, which will be used to line this first dress and at least one other. Once it was washed, it crinkled up like a mofo and I had to iron ALL of it while it was still damp.

Seriously, my wrist hurts now. It took me over an hour.

Rather than cutting the lining, I started prep work on another dress. This one is a shirtdress from a traditional, well-known pattern company. (I’m not naming them for reasons you’ll soon see, but it’s obvious in the photos.) I purchased a “downloadable” pattern, and it’s the first and last pattern I’ll ever buy from them. It came as a DRMed PDF, and I had to install some really dodgy proprietary software to even view it. And here’s the thing – this dress has a couple different options, so there are many, many possible pieces. The whole pattern is well over 100 A4 pages. And the software will only let you print the entire thing. You can’t specify pages, and even if you could, there’s no overview that shows you just the ones you want. Oh, and the DRM also prevented you from printing-to-PDF to try to work around these limitations. I was livid.

Of course, a livid geek is also a motivated one. In less than an hour I was able to, uh, figure out how to create an unencumbered PDF. That allowed me to create an overview which showed all the pages together, thus allowing me to see which page ranges I needed to print for my selected dress. Turns out I needed less than 60, so I saved 40+ wasted pages. YOU’RE WELCOME, TREES. AND SUCK IT, TRADITIONAL PATTERN COMPANY THAT I’LL NEVER BUY FROM AGAIN.

You can see my overview on the left there. The green pages were the ones I needed for my dress. On the right is the stack of printouts.

Print-at-home patterns are convenient but it means you have to go to the effort of assembling them. I have a good system down involving a mat cutter, glue, and tape. I managed to get about half the pages stuck together and assembled tonight.

Tomorrow I’ll finish assembly and then cut out the pieces properly. Then on the weekend I should be able to start sewing the outer part of the Hawaiian bias dress and cutting the lining!

After yet more crawling around on my poor knees I managed to finish cutting all the main pattern pieces tonight, which means all the masking tape and fabric are finally off the floor. For now. 😂

The final preparation step is to hang all of the pieces for at least 24 hours. This is because they were cut on the bias – that means the fabric (which is already really drapey due to the rayon in it) is very stretchy and can grow on you. So by letting it hang, you’re allowing the pieces to stretch before you start sewing them together.

I was a little worried about how the skirt pieces would come out. It was hard to tell as I was cutting it whether the flower placement would be nicely random. The three pieces across the front are more similar than I’d like, but it’s still offset a bit and the Snook said he didn’t even notice. I’m not sure whether I have a big enough piece left to cut another one, so I think I’m stuck with it regardless.

I reckon I’ll leave these to hang tomorrow while I get onto the next task: cutting out most of the pieces again, this time in the lining fabric. (My back is killing me already…)