I made the “placket dress” I hinted at previously. the buttons are little wooden guys from joanns. It was a good learning experience, but I did a sloppy job. At worst, its a suitable house dress. At best, I can wear it to work with a cardigan. I based it loosely on the Colette Patterns Sorbetto, but I removed the pleat in the pattern piece, and lengthened about 14". The major issue was the bias tape facing did not get along very well with the placket. The fabric is some poly silky material, and I used leftover cotton bias tape.. not the best mix. Here is a bad pic:

I also made a dress from the Japanese Stylish Dress Book. I LOVE it. Its shapeless with a ridiculous amount of ease in the back, but its my favorite thing I’ve made so far this year. I made the smallest size, even though the “size chart” advised me to make it two sizes bigger. If you want to buy this book, beware: you pretty much have to trace the pattern pieces (vs just cutting them out) because the 27 patterns are all on top of each other on 3 double sided giant pages. I suppose that is the “right way” to use patterns, but I usually take the lazy route and just cut out the pattern pieces straight from the pattern. I found it very time consuming to trace the pattern pieces with tracing paper, and then add seam allowances. Maybe thats how they do it in Japan. (Also, after I took this picture, i added a strip of the dark fabric at the bottom to lengthen the dress a bit– it was very short before).

Today some friends and I are having a go at dyeing fibers. We are using onion skins. I’ve been scouring every grocery store to find dyestuffs, which got me some weird looks from cashiers and other shoppers. To dye, I have some knit cotton/modal and some stripey-eyelety cotton, as well as two skeins of worsted lamb’s pride, which is mostly wool with a little mohair. I hope the yarn turns out, if it does it might turn into a Lonely Tree Shawl! We’ll see how it goes!!!!