Listening: Kate Wolf, "Midnight on the Water"
Mispickel is a needle freak.
More accurately, she's a pin freak. She loves the plastic heads on my sewing pins. Obviously, this is a bad thing so I've closed my tomato pincushions up in the cabinet and replaced my pin dish with a box with a snug lid. She's figured the box out, though; she batted it off the table the other day and wrestled with it. The lid held, though. I've already had a pin removed from one pet--the veterinarian found one in Diamond's peritoneum during an exploratory surgery; she saw it on the x-ray and thought it must be a sliver of turkey bone from the carcass that gave Diamond pancreatitis--and I'm not eager to have another pet go through that.
Less dangerously, but still unfortunately, she's also a fabric-yardage and iron-cord freak. I can't get a thing done that involves trailing yardage while she's around. I had to close her up in the bathroom while I cut out skirt gores last night (it's a large bathroom--one of those two-room ones--and her food, box, and lots of toys are in it. She has the saddest meow I've ever heard, though, when she realizes she's being excluded).
Anyway, this was progress that somehow didn't feel like progress, which was frustrating. The fact that it felt frustrating when it didn't need to is somehow extra-frustrating. Or maybe I was just in a grumpy mood last night. I got all seven skirt gores and the skirt pockets cut; sewed and flat-felled the three back gores; and sewed and flat-felled the side-front gores to the two center-front gores.
Terrible, useless, picture, but proof that seams were made:
That is a side-back sewn to the center-back. I didn't go crazy chevroning the stripes, although I did match the stripes along the center back fold--the stripes on each of the side-back pieces match--so that they would at least be symmetrically non-matched and my hips wouldn't look uneven.
I have not reattached the inset belt yet. It occurred to me last night that the skirt back is the only one of the "quadrants" (bodice back, bodice front, skirt back, skirt front) that does not have gathers in it, so its width is already determined. Thus, the skirt needs to be attached first so that I can make sure the side seams of the skirt and bodice match; I can adjust the gathers in the back bodice to accommodate the skirt width.
My mess-up may have averted yet another mess-up; who knew?
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