So what’s next?

Now that the One Dress To Rule Them All is finished (yay!) and awaiting the big reveal in June, and it turns out I do have a little bit of time left before the wedding, it’s time to figure out what to do with whatever sewing time I have left between now and then! Well, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, especially recently as I’ve been back at my retail job and have had more mental time to kill. I’m trying not to be overly ambitious because, you know, 2 months to W-day and that might take up some time. But here’s what I’m thinking…

• Doug’s tie, of course. Which will be much easier and quicker to finish, because I can totally sew that while he’s around.
• Honeymoon clothes! I’ve been plotting my wardrobe for that out in my head, and I’m sure that will get a post at some point. But I do have a few holes that need filling. Particularly, I’d like to make one or two pairs of shorts, and for the sake of time, I’m going to do a total cheater refashion and cut off/hem a couple of pairs of jeans. They’re thrifted jeans that I’ve pretty much only been wearing to the garden shop–one is a little too short for my legs anyway, and the other was a victim of the dryer ink disaster last fall. The obvious damage looks like it’s mostly lower down on the leg than I would need anyway. I do need to cut them long enough that I can also wear them to work in the summer, which means no shorter than mid-thigh, but I think I’d be more comfortable with that length anyway. And both of these pairs fit pretty decently at my waist, so it should do. I still totally want to test out my Thurlows on another pair of shorts, but that can wait until after the wedding.
• Also for the honeymoon, I’d love to do a trial run of the Tiramisu dress! I don’t have too much in the stash that would have the necessary yardage, but I do have some plain navy blue jersey bedsheets that I inherited when my brother got married. They’re too big for my bed, so I’ve been hoarding them for the last few years purely for muslin purposes, and navy blue should fit wonderfully into the color scheme that’s shaping up in my head. I’d also like to knock out a quick tank top as a palate-cleanser, and I have a potential idea for a layering piece. Because you know I will be the one who will get cold on a tropical island!
• One little secret I’ve been keeping–I did buy three patterns off of Etsy around Christmas, for some lingerie. (Which is strange for me to type, knowing that my mom might be reading this…) But if I have time, I’d like to test out at least one of them. (My fiance would probably say that I should make this first priority, but I don’t know how badly my friends will try to embarrass me what I’m getting for the bridal shower yet. I’ll find out on Saturday.)

There, that doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable, does it? I have a few things lined up in my head for after the wedding as well, including a whole lot of Thurlow work so I can try to have some actual pants that fit before the fall rolls around, and a couple of self-challenges that I’m setting for myself. One will be an ongoing project, one will have a deadline, but more on that later. The one thing I will reveal is that I’d asked Gillian for a sewing dare that actually involved, you know, sewing.   The dare she gave me:

@sew_and_so OK, #sewingdare: Treat yourself to a cute new pattern and lovely fabric to make it! You deserve a treat!
— Gillian(@GillianCrafts) March 26, 2013

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I polled the quite biased sewcialists on Twitter, and the consensus was that rewarding oneself for accomplishing a huge and very time-consuming couture sewing project trumped stashbusting pledges. (But I promise that this will be my only cheat, since technically, the lime green silk was bought with the wedding in mind, and therefore falls under the parameters that I’d set!)

I’d considered buying something for the Pavlova, since I did already treat myself to this new pattern, I’m just not sure I have things in the stash to make both pieces.  I’d also thought that I could use it as part of the honeymoon wardrobe. But hours of scouring my favorite fabric websites turned up nothing that’s jumping out at me for it at this point. And, as Gillian put it in a later tweet, “go big or go home. right?”

So, for my sewing dare, I treated myself to the Darling Ranges dress by Megan Nielsen, and some fabric from Gorgeous Fabrics. I haven’t tried a Megan Nielsen pattern yet, but I’ve heard good things about them. It was a tough call between this one and the Reglisse dress from Deer & Doe, because that one is just too cute and it reminds me of something that Jane Bennet would have worn in the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. But in the end, the Darling Ranges won out, because…

1. I’ve been wanting a more autumn-friendly dress for awhile now–most of my dresses have no sleeves and are in summery colors.
2. I have two weddings to attend this fall, and will need something to wear. I’m a bridesmaid in one of them, so that’s covered, but I still will probably need something cute to wear for rehearsal dinners and such, right?
3. Even though it’s a longer-sleeved dress, it doesn’t look frumpy. Those are hard to find. 
4. As it turns out, it’s a good thing the Darling Ranges won out, because apparently I just won the Reglisse pattern from a giveaway at Paunnet! Thanks, Anna! 

But…. I’m sorry to say that I think I’ve failed this dare.  I bought this fabric for it:

I tried to be smart about the fabric choice, and choose a print that–guess what–already went with a bunch of things in my wardrobe! So I was thinking that I could layer this with my  brown jacket, or my brown hoodie cardigan sweater, or the thrifted tan jacket that I picked up recently,  or throw a coordinating knit top over it and wear it as a skirt, and so on. (My other choice was this adorable dragonfly print, but I realized that would require a lot more effort to work as a layering piece. I also managed to resist the temptation to further break the pledge and buy both pieces.) Also, as far as fabric choice goes, I do have a serious weakness for paisley!

But–and I am not blaming Gorgeous Fabrics for this, because I know the problem had to be my color perception–now that I’m seeing the fabric in person, I’m not so convinced that this is a good match for this pattern. The blue looked way more teal instead of this colonial blue, and the fabric looked brighter in general on my computer monitor. If I were to be perfectly honest, if I saw what I got in a brick-and-mortar store, I wouldn’t have bought it. And my gut tells me that if I make this dress out of this fabric, I’m going to think it looks totally granny (and not in the chic way) and I’m going to hate it. So that leaves me with two questions–what can I do with 3 yards of dull-colored paisley fabric, and do I have anything in my stash that I can actually use to make this pattern? A serious question, given that most, if not all, of my fabrics are more separates-length yardages…

Maybe this would work better as the Reglisse. What do you think?