Lessons Learned, or, Why I’ll be sacrificing my Friday night

So. I’ve been working on a test version of the pattern I plan to use to make my wedding dress. Before I bought super fancy wedding fabric, I wanted to try it out on some basic cotton to make sure A) the pattern isn’t too uber-complicated (I hate using other people’s patterns to begin with, so when they get too complicated my eyes tend to glaze over and all the words jumble together) and B) I still like the dress once I’m wearing it.

But of course, being a thrifty kinda gal I can’t just make a dress for no reason. So I picked some nice funky cotton in colors I loved and figured I’d make it so I could actually wear it. And a couple weeks ago, I looked at the calendar and realized like, whoa, Widespread Panic shows are comin’ up crazy quick! (As I write this, crazy quick= tomorrow.) I decided what better occasion to crank out that dress for than to pretty up and get my groove on with JB and the boys... So I got to work. The pattern isn’t so hard, but there are some intricate patchwork pieces that need to be worked. So you need to be in the right frame of mind. Which is where the lessons come in.

Lesson number 1: Don’t drink and sew. For sure not one of my better ideas... but spontaneity happens and who am I to argue? I was groovin’ away on the dress one Saturday afternoon and friends started showing up... Not gonna kick em out... not gonna stop working... but the wine, now that was my downfall... next thing I knew, I drank the whole bottle and I’m spending my Sunday ripping seams... Seam ripping is the theme of this post in fact.

Which brings me to lesson number 2: Only sew when well rested. The pattern has a zig zag design at the bottom which is formed by a series of triangles sewn together into rows, and then the rows are sewn together to create the complete pattern... you get the right pattern by arranging the triangles in the right color order... which I did quite nicely. What I didn’t do in my sleep-deprived state last night was check to make sure I was sewing the final row onto the bottom of the skirt right side up. So now I have a beautiful zig zag pattern until you get to the bottom where it just looks like random geometric shapes... so I’ll be spending my lunch hour today ripping those stitches out... and there’s a lot of them. And since once I realized I had done it, I decided to stop working before I hurt myself, it means that in order to be groovin’ in a new dress by Saturday night, no night out for me tonight... I’ll be home, with my sewing machine and some tunes... but no wine, I swear!