Just in Time for Christmas

The semester is coming to a close after a very busy four months. Life off campus is its own wonderful adventure. I've acted in front of a class, TWICE (never thought that would ever happen), wrote 6 research papers that were all due the same week, put my budgeting skills to good use,  plenty of other English major-y things, took a friend to the ER, and changed the spare tire on the mini-van all by myself, and still managed to sew a little. In this particular season of sewing I've been using some beautiful fabric from MissMatatabi on Esty, which ended up being used for a dress and a shirt. There was another dress in September that I made with some stash fabric, but it was a little disappointing.

That said, the dress turned out alright. Some setbacks: it is a bit tight in the shoulders; I now know that I am going to make the armholes of the Best Dresses book dresses bigger (look at the side bar for the books I'm using>>>). I put my zipper in after I already sewed up the other half of the seam it was on and hemmed the dress. I won't do that again; there was some "Make it work" moments with the unevenness that comes from putting the zipper in after sewing the rest of the seam. The bunching around the waist (not the gathers) that comes from the shoulder being to tight have inspired me to start truly altering patterns to fit me, intimidating, tedious, and messy as the process may be. The dress looks alright, but I want it to look like it was made for me.

I'm also working on a shirt with lace trim I'll share in the next two weeks.

Here's a random detail of my life: I'm working on watching all the Studio Ghibli movies and two that you should really watch if you have not already are The Wind Rises and Porco Rosso.

This is inspired by the fact that I am doing my Senior Project on Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle on which Hayao Miyazaki based his film. I love the book and film so much, that I decided to spend 9 months writing about the book and its place in children's literature. 

Happy Sewing!