guards

Ok, so Blogger decided to cooperate with the picture-posting for a moment, so here's a post from a couple of days ago.

Projects grow, no? This one sure is, although mostly it’s a matter of redoing more and more things. I was thinking last night (don’t laugh, it happens on occasion). I was wondering whether it’s really true that every time I take a shortcut in sewing it ends up taking me three times as long as if I did it right in the first place. Maybe it’s just that I only remember those cases. Here's a before and after of the guards (the before is on the left in grosgrain, the after is on the right in linen.)

 


Anyway, I'm done with the guard makeover, excepting the one that'll go on the bottom once I measure the hem. If you recall, I had decided that the shiny cheap grosgrain ribbon was blinding me and hurting my head (the part of my head which contains my vanity mostly). Ahem. So I sucked it up and made some nice linen guards. While I was at it, I changed the widths a wee bit to make it more visually pleasing. Or more visually pleasing to the dress engineer at any rate, and if he’s happy, I’m happy. One kind of nice thing about making my own guards was that I could taper the guards down the sides of the skirt, which I think looks nicer than the way it was before. I have all kinds of future ideas for couching something on the guards and perhaps beading the forepart and etc etc etc , but there’s no way that could happen by the deadline, so it’ll have to wait. Particularly since I've gone back to my normal "no machine stitching showing" rule. If I'm going to take the time to do this, I may as well do it right.

So yes, I’m committed to either replacing the ribbon on the sleeves or else making a new set. Right now, I’m leaning towards the latter. I think it would probably be less work. Also, since I’m about out of green fabric, that’ll be a nice excuse to use something breathable. We shall see. I might leave that for last, since sleeves at Virginia faires last approximately 10 minutes or until the pictures are taken or the contest is judged or whatever.