Well my grand plans of finishing Anne and working on all kinds of things over my 3 day weekend went bust.
I started out strong on Thursday night, finishing my underskirt with the exception of a hook and eye at the waist. I also discovered the cause of the problem with my old hoopskirt and fixed it.
(Basically, when I first got that hoopskirt in 2007 to wear under Belle, it had a sharp drop off after the last hoop. Since Belle was only one layer of fabric at that point and I had no petticoat to wear with it, I made ruffles out of leftover satin and attached them to the bottom, to smooth over the drop off. Turns out the weight of those ruffles is what has been pulling the hoops out of shape. I took them all off and the hoops pretty much sprang back to life and the hoops now weigh MUCH MUCH less which is nice.)
Here’s the whole gang hard at work that night:
And a couple of awkward shots of everything pinned back together:
Friday Chase cut out the front piece for my bodice – but I never got to working on it. I cleaned up my office and started tackling the sleeves. I realized that the sleeve pattern in my Tudor pattern wasn’t going to work, so I came up with something else. I ended up with sleeves that had 16 slashes in them each, each slash needing facing, and then beading with pearls.
Working on the slashes on Sleeve 1:
Beading Sleeve 1:
I think my pearls are a LITTLE big (and heavy) but I’m going with it.
I spent all night Sat night beading and most of the day Sunday. Just one stupid sleeve.
But, here it is last night:
Still waiting on my fabric for the interior sleeve, and I need to finish the interior edges of the sleeve and obviously sew it up, but the bulk of the work is done on it. Some of the pearls need a little tightening up too which i’ll do when I’m finishing the inside.
Then… onto Sleeve 2 BLEGH
(the pink underneath is just an old dry-erase board I’m using as a table)
Honestly, I’m really tempted to just go buy a pearl trim and replace what I’ve got with it – but that would mean I wasted about 10 hours of beading this weekend. Uuuugh I don’t know what to dooooo but the trim would look better… may stop by hancocks and see what they have on the way home… boo.
And in non-Anne news, I got the eyelets for my Peggy belt buckle, a shirt for Peggy at goodwill that will look nice with some altering, and shoes for Donna. Yay.