I spent half of Friday filling in at work, then ran some errands, and spent Friday night and all of Saturday with a friend (road trip. More on that later). My plan was to sew like a fiend on Sunday. Plans sort of got tanked when the navy blue piping I needed turned out to be an endangered species. I knew Hobby Lobby would have it but they're closed on Sundays, so I ended up going to two Wal-Marts and two Jo Anns before I found it. Jo Ann #1 had an admirable color-palette of trims and pipings but was out of navy blue. Aargh!
Anyway, I was home by 2:00 and hit the sewing table. I had started resizing 4727 ages ago when I planned to use it for something else, so most of the pieces were already traced onto newsprint. I traced the few that were left, did the requisite cutting and then overlapping and spreading as needed to take the thing in a size and lengthen it. Then, I got out my plaid and started pinning and cutting.
I actually made a lot of progress, although I did something wrong when I resized the skirt and inset belt, so I brought them with me to work today to fiddle around with at lunch. The skirt appears to be much too big, so apparently I didn't take as much out of the waistline as I meant to (I'm a 1940's size 16 except for my hips and backside, which are a 1940's size 18-20). Aargh. If it's not too far off, I can fix it with darts, but I'll have to go home and re-cut the pieces so I don't do this again. And that's after I did a world-class job of plaid matching, too! Doh!
Part of the skirt adjustment (note the cut and overlapped part to the right, over the side curve):
Pockets. One side of the pockets is sewn into the seam of the side-front and center-front skirt panels, but the others are topstitched onto the skirt body, so the piping is in two pieces (since the seam allowance goes two different directions: Outward on the set-in-seam side, inward on the topstitched sides). I hand-basted it all before I sewed it on.
The skirt so far:
Update: So . . . I was right, the skirt waist is three inches bigger than the inset belt, even though I measured how much I took out of both. Weird. I'm going to let the inset belt back out an inch, and then take some darts in the skirt to bring it in. Then, I'm going to go over those bloody pattern pieces with a fine-toothed comb (and a measuring tape) and figure out what the heck went wrong. I wonder if they were the wrong size in the first place? The skirt isn't supposed to be gathered. I need to check the bodice, too, to make sure it all matches.
Too bad, really, because I did such a wicked job matching the plaid:
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