Finished, worn, loved

I finished my dress in plenty of time to wear to dinner last night. I was right about the bias dropping. I don't know how much extra it dropped for being hung for two days, but I was confident when I hemmed it that it'd be fine.

You can see in this photo what a big difference there is in length around the hem. The longest point is on the true bias.

I had no helpers when it came time to mark the hem, so took a deep breath and did it solo. I put the dress on and marked where I wanted it to hit. It was quite a challenge to hold it steady against my thigh while I marked a point just below my knee! From there it was a simple matter of putting it on my dummy and marking it by measuring up from the floor with a long ruler. My fear doing it solo is that while my dummy is very similarly proportioned to me it isn't as accurate as getting a helper to mark it on me. I figured it wasn't going to be significantly out even if it was a tad. (I've done this before with success, but not for a while). I have one of those chalk puffer thingies for marking your own hems, but I'm, um, not sure which box in the roof it's in.

Anyway, after doing my baby hem on the dress and pressing it and putting on a decent bra (which makes a huge difference!), it looks like this:

Photo credit to the overexcited nine year old who was looking forward to being babysat by her aunt and staying up past bedtime to help her with the twins!

And here's the one she took of me and David just before we left. That's Nicholas' head in the corner. Nothing happens in this house without his investigating! David's shirt is one of approximately 15+ I have made over the years for him or his twin brother. It's my absolute favourite, Burda 8471 I can churn one out in no time - the fit needed very little tweaking, so he doesn't need to be involved till I hand him a completed shirt. He likes this.

We had a great dinner with my parents (Dad's thanks for making the boat cover). It was great fun being with just them - usually when we catch up there are lots of other family members around, and it was really good having a long uninterrupted time to natter. We reminisced about all sorts of things, like our family reunion tramp of the Milford Track when I was 15. It started raining within 5 minutes of the boat dropping us off, we nearly got held up for a day by flooding on the track, the McKinnon pass was covered in mist (and rain of course) so we slogged up all those zigzags and didn't get to see any of the view, and it stopped raining AS I WALKED OUT AT THE FAR END! (The Sutherland Falls were spectacular though.) Dad got the best work day of his life at a similar time (my bitter and twisted memory is that it was a week later, but he thinks not) by being flown over the area in glorious sunshine in a helicopter to inspect some tie-down thing he had designed for a radio mast up a mountain in the area. Tough life.