Stuff in progress

Yet another motivation to blog - friends who give me a hard time about not doing so! Why they complain I can't understand - I brought my top to our fortnightly craft night last night, so they could have taken a close up look if they'd wanted to!

This one is progressing considerably slower than the red and cream one because I keep having to do other stuff. A couple of shirts for a friend of David (broad of shoulder and chest, slender of waist and neck, poor guy can't buy a shirt to fit, so was very pleased with a couple of custom made shirts). I may have shot myself in the foot with them though - David now knows I can knock out a shirt in a day or two (when fit has already been worked out). Oops.

I also made another bubble dress for a market next week. Kahlia is having a stall and offered to sell my designs on my behalf. She is so much better at marketing me than I am, and shortly starting her own website to sell the reusable lunchbags and other things that she makes, along with other products for kids. Since I'm not doing anything else with my designs at the moment it seems like a perfect fit to me!
And I figured it was about time I got back into some pattern work, so here is my work in progress (so, J, K and M, you can stop giving me a hard time about not updating my blog - this is what I'm up to!)
I got Helen Joseph-Armstong's pattern drafting book out of the library last week (I'll do a post on the bodice block when I've toiled it - it looks odd to me!) and the drop shoulder idea took hold. Above is my first go at it. The sharpie line is where I think I'll add a princess line. I've no idea what the neckline or skirt of this dress will look like yet, (I think it'll be a dress) but I wanted to try the gathered sleeve before I commit to further work on it. I got this far before I took the twins to kindy, so I have yet to try it on my house model.

And there's also this dress, another prototype of course! This one is intended to be for Isabella.

I loved the pleat/belt combo from a dress I saw somewhere, and it's an easy feature to do, but unfortunately it doesn't give enough fullness to the skirt. Again I have yet to check on the house model, but I think the skirt will look a bit skimpy. I haven't decided how to deal with this yet for the next version, but this one may just get shortened to tunic length. Since I'm not sure, I haven't added any embellishment to the dress. It's just hanging around, waiting.

So there you are - several projects in various stages of completion. I'm capable of intense focus and prolonged dedication to a project or idea, and also of having the attention span of a gnat.