Our car drama is not over yet. I picked my car up on Thursday and discovered before I'd even left the service bay that the "check engine" light was on and it was idling oddly. They handed me back the keys to the loaner. Sigh. It took them all of Friday to figure out that they had disconnected a vacuum hose. It's fine now.
Dad and I drove the Ranger three hours to meet my brother halfway and do a car swap. It ran fine. Steering worked fine. No sweat. And now we have Mom's new hatchback back.
Until Sunday, when Mom hit something on the freeway, flattened the tire, bent the rim, and probably damaged the suspension (she couldn't avoid it without causing a major accident).
I started doing some more tweaking on Simplicity 4727 on Saturday evening but then ran out of steam and decided to go for an easier project. (I've completely bailed on the 1917 suit sew along. I can't find the pattern. I'm too far behind. I'll have to do it myself later.)
So I got out Simplicity 9880 (1996), the one I used, with an inset belt added, to make the green prairie dress, and did the upper-chest alteration on it.
I'm making this out of a royal blue cotton bedsheet. It's pretty work already but it was cheap and it's good enough for a wearable muslin. The skirt and sleeve facings are red and blue floral (probably 1950's. Terrible, cheap, fabric). It will have bracelet-length tapered sleeves and button down the front the way the green dress did.
Yes, let the Amish jokes fly. It should be super comfortable. I added some room to the upper chest/bust, where the green dress pulls across the front shoulders; lengthened the bodice slightly, extended the shoulder line a little, and flattened out the shoulder angle some since it felt as though it were pulling down on the caps of my arms but loose around the neck. The try-on of the totally-unfinished bodice last night suggests all these are improvements.
The skirt is a single width of sheeting sewn into a tube (it's a queen-sized sheet, so it's about 88 inches wide), so I did Colonial pockets because there aren't side seams.
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