Promise (finally) kept

My sewing room has finally moved.  I now have windows to look outside, even though they are at ground level.  No painting or beautification, just a lot of cleaning and moving and sorting.  Not a pretty room, but my thinking is that I will tinker with the layout and organization of the room, so that when I finally get to the point where I can paint and beautify, it will be a simple matter of moving things away from the walls, painting (and all the rest of the mess that comes under that heading), then moving things back to their proper spaces.  At certain points in this drawn out process, I was able to sew.  Then I tackled the business of attaching shelves to the wall, screwing hooks into the ceiling for work lights, and generally creating mass chaos.  In the midst of all of this, we had a tornado warning.  No actual tornado, but quite a thunderstorm, which resulted in puddles on the basement floor in my "new sewing room".  Had to find the source of this annoying inconvenience.  Found it!  A tiny little spot on the roof where the roofers missed with caulking.  Now there are different ways to deal with this.  Call the roofers, wait for roofers, wait for something to get done.  The other option is to go to the hardware store, buy a tube of roof goop, get up on the roof and deal with it.  I chose the second option, and now I'll just have to wait for the next thunderstorm to see if I was right.  (Lovely view of the neighbourhood from my roof, by the way.)  Unfortunately all of this did not help the mess in the basement.  Hopefully to-day I will be able to move things back to where they belong, and get back to sewing.  I have to have all my samples for sewing classes done by Labour Day (can't be that it's only a week away!), so that means I'll be spending lots of time in my "new" room, which had better now stay dry.

My sewing and picture-taking are now completely out of sync, not to mention any semblance of plans for sewing, but I'll try to catch up within the next few posts.  One of the things that I did in spurts, is this dress for my mother.

This one was a looong time in coming.  Way back n 198? my sister made a dress for my mother.  It was too full, didn't sit right, the neck was too high, etc., etc.  Bottom line - it did not get worn.  It hung in my mother's basement, unloved.  A few years down the road I was asked to "fix" it.  Several more years down the road, I picked apart all the seams, washed and pressed all the pieces, hung them on a hanger, and there they stayed for many more years.  The fabric is nothing spectacular, and any sane person would have just tossed the pieces long ago.  But I had promised, and I really do try to keep my promises, so the only thing to do was to lay out all the pieces and figure out something.  I loosely followed the pattern that I generally use for my mother to cut down the excess width, fiddled with the neckline and put in a short zipper in the front seam (the only one in a colour that matched that I had in my zipper drawer).  Goodness!  It's been ages since I've done a centred zipper in anything!  Guess it looks all right.  Now it's done.  Promise kept, even if it did take a few decades.  Funny how time just flies by, but things just sit there to remind you of all that you have not managed to accomplish.  It can be rather overwhelming.  Just for good measure - the back view. 

 

Now I really must get back to clearing up this mess around me, or I'll not accomplish a thing in the way of sewing.