this post brought to you by: gravity.

good morning, boys and girls. i’m writing this post with the last vestiges of the 3am adrenaline rush that comes with being woken by the sounds of crashing and glass shattering.

i was out of bed and flying down the hallway before i was even really awake, i think. and just as i rounded the corner to the kitchen i had a brief moment of maybe running out here like a maniac isn’t the brightest idea followed quickly by a glance at the clock (3:12) and well, jeremy’s still home so he’ll back me up if it’s a masked murderer.

spoiler alert: it wasn’t. turns out the old “glue a soda tab top to the back of xxxx and hang it on the wall” idea doesn’t work so well for plates. one of the three i had above the kitchen counter fell to it’s splintery death, taking my little glass straw dispenser along for the grisly ride. :(

you know what’s not awesome?  teeny, tiny shards of glass covering your kitchen counter, sink and floor at 3 in the morning.

but at least we get to spend some time together, because there’s no way i’m going back to sleep anytime soon. although i certainly hope this isn’t what it takes for me to get a blog post up nowadays, because i just don’t have that many plates to spare.

moving on--this dress was one of the last things we photographed on our Massive Handmade Fashion Show, so probably we were a little punch drunk. we were having great fun coming up with some of the typical “fashion blogger” poses for guinevere to copy, e.g.:

‘carefree and fun’ aka ‘hey look i have pockets’

‘bashful’ aka ‘did i step in something?’

my personal favorite: the ‘bashful’ combined with the ‘pigeon toe stance’

we thought we were very funny. what can i say? it was a lot of dress modeling all at once.

anyway, about the dress. this bad boy was a straight up mess. guinevere wanted a dress she’d seen on e-shakti, and while i love their stuff i simply won’t spend that kind of money on a still growing girl. so we came up with a design together using a couple yards of this dark blue fabric i was gifted from someone’s stash cleansing. the only thing i bought for this dress was 2 packages of white piping, because i was too lazy to make my own. and at only $1.47/package at walmart i consider it good time management plus still thrifty—basically the dress cost less than $3. #winning

the only problem is it turned into sort of a hot mess. the first bodice i drafted turned out terribly. it didn’t fit at all and wasn’t even salvageable. katy posted a pic today on instagram of her mess of fabric clippings and remarked that she sometimes wished she could gather it up and roll it out again like dough. yeah. it was like that. i had one more shot to get it right, otherwise i wouldn’t have enough fabric. and the second bodice was giving me fits too.

this bodice is made of four separate pieces (not counting the collar). each piece has white piping sewn into the seam. it’s not quite princess seaming (i still had to put some darts in the sides which are too high grrrr), but there is a definite curve to the pieces to allow the piping to remain fairly straight. i think my issue was somewhere in the additional seam allowance needed for all three pieces going across, plus extra for piping, plus extra for the waistband portion…the first time i shorted myself (this piece can’t possibly need to be that big! uhhh…yeah, it is.) and the second time i overcompensated. but it worked because i ended up draping and pinning the thing right on her. she’s a good kid—quite patient. she earns her dresses.

i also shirred the back of the dress to keep it snug and eliminate the need for a zipper.

a full skirt (with pockets!), white collar and some buttons completed the look.

she was happy, i was happy, we were all happy happy. it’s a sweet dress—vintage and cute and modest and trendy in all the right ways. so despite the trouble it gave me i’m glad it worked out in the end. it was worth the $3.

now if you’ll excuse me…i’m off to 1) find that dress and clip that infuriating stray thread on the second button from the bottom and then 2) go to bed. night night.