Working away... cooking! client work and clothes for me!

 It's Friday, but I won't be posting about food. I have the sinus Yucks once again. Luckily I had cooked too much shabbat dinner on previous weeks so I just pulled chicken and challah out of the freezer and they are warming up in the oven as I type.

Despite feeling crummy I have actually gotten chunks of work done this week. Accompanying me in my work has been an excellent podcast, Sew What. Any of my readers who are textile junkies will enjoy it.

Wednesday I baked a bread. I had left a bit of dough from a batch I had baked last week in a bowl in the fridge.That old dough served as the starter for this loaf.

I included some fine bulgur wheat in the dough. Before baking the bread I dampened the loaf with water, sprinkled flour over the dough and then scored the loaf. It tasted as good as it looks.

I began working on Judith's atara. I started with some block printing on the silk.

Then I drafted the letters on some cardstock with a square tipped paint brush.

I had made the letters a little too shorts so I added the needed length with a sharpie.

I taped some white  cotton batiste to the cardstock to keep it from slipping around. Then I traced over the letters with a pencil.

Then I basted the cotton with the pencilled letters onto the silk so the cotton would stay in place as i embroidered.

Then I began to embroider.

I suppose that I could have done ALL of the embroidery before I started to get rid of the white cotton.

But I didn't. I embroider a couple of letters and then I pull away the cotton. It keeps me from going nuts doing this painstaking work. When i am done embroidering all of the letters, I will use a fine crochet hook to pull some of the loose threads to the back of the atara.

At this moment I have finished embroidering more than half of the letters.

There are times when I make garments and they just don't work.  I had made an olive green dress a bunch f years ago out of a remnant that arrived in my stash I believe in a mystery bundle from Fabric Mart. I made the sort of summer dress my mother might have worn--a slightly tenty dress with a split neck that had some machine embroidery on khaki ribbon. I had mis cut the armholes and they were just too low. The dress could only be worn with very specific underpinnings which meant that it was mainly unworn.

Today I realized that if I cut the bodice off at the armholes I could end up with a wearable skirt.  I used an iron to press in the cut lines, I sewed a turquoise ribbon to the top of the skirt. I edge stitched the ribbon, sewed the ends of an elastic that was smaller than my waist together and then sewed the elastic into the casing made by the ribbon.

Now my failed dress is a wearable skirt.

The dress was an awkward length. By cutting the bodice off where I did I gained several inches in length. Yes I had cut the original dress so the sides were longer than the center.

I don't mind the bit of turquoise ribbon peeking out.

This isn't rocket science sewing.

Lat week i made this dress while I was thinking about other work that I ought to have been doing.

It's made out of a zebra striped cotton-spandex shirting. (Putting the dress on my dress-making dummy I realize that I need to make my dummy a bit smaller on top.)

I love the godets I had added at the sides. 

The dress feels like something that I might have worn in the late 1980s. It feels like a party---even if I am not attending one.

Anyway I hope that by the end of the weekend I can scare the Yucks away with lots of tea and sleep.

Shabbat Shalom!