One Down, One Billion to Go

I made that big long list you saw--where I listed all the sewing and stitching projects--and I'm slowly making my way through it, tackling the shorter, easier projects first to get them out of the way so I can get to the longer, more involved, more satisfying projects.

I showed you the dark green pinwale corduroy dress. LL Bean, size 8. Very soft. I had parts of an acid green pinwale corduroy shirt, and I wanted to make covered buttons. Because the dress is so dark green, I wanted another shade of green to help keep it from looking swampy. And the shirt had two chest pockets I thought I might want to add to the dress.

Alas, all did not go as planned. Turns out that the corduroy made the covered buttons just ever-so-slightly too large, so they wouldn't go through the buttonholes. That's where the part about it being an LL Bean dress comes in:  if it had been a more cheaply made dress, with crappy buttonholes, I could have just enlarged them. But these are nice buttonholes, and hey:  I may like the dress, and I may even wear it next autumn, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to like it enough to re-do the buttonholes. No. I've got 15 million other projects that are WAY more exciting than this one.

So I tried on the dress and figured out which buttons I want closed and which I want open (I'll wear it over leggings or jeans, probably with a shirt underneath), and I sewed the buttons on accordingly--so you can't button or unbutton them.

The pockets. I carefully removed the pockets from the acid green shirt, doing this while watching a movie, making sure to keep the top thread in one long piece so I wouldn't have to pick out all the tiny bits of thread. And omigod:  in each pocket, when I finally got them off, I found a long curly black hair, ie., definitely not a piece of animal fur. As you might be able to imagine, this creeped me out so badly that never mind The EGE reminding me I had washed the shirt, so the hairs (shudder) were "clean." Never mind that. The pockets themselves creeped me out.

I sucked it up and tried the dress on and tried to place the pockets where they might look good, but of course now I HATED the pockets. They were loathesome, the ugliest pockets in the world, not deserving of a place on a garment. They are Pockets from The Devil. Communist Pockets. Tea Party Pockets.

Your Very Own Personal Bugaboo Pockets, is what I'm saying here.

This is why you do not see nice little acid green pockets to match the buttons. Well, that and the fact that chest pockets on dresses are kind of dorky to me. But I can't resist an opportunity to try to make things all matchy-matchy! You know me.

So this is what I did this weekend, in addition to a bunch of other stuff that included cleaning out the closets and moving stuff out into the storage building. All I can say about that is: thank goodness I had the foresight to put in those two 24-foot [I wish!] 12-foot steel rods for clothes. Thank goodness. That and, "Gee. I wish I'd had four put in, instead of just two."

Sigh.

Today? Trying to finish up a podcast with a delightful artist I just met, another book review video to edit, and an interview with one of my favorite jewelry artists this afternoon. Better get busy--