Running in the Background

The husband looked at me yesterday morning while I was making breakfast and said, “Are you alright?” I knew why he was asking—I was physically present, frying bacon, but my brain was occupied with taking apart a problem and putting it back together again. I told him that was what I was doing and he nodded. I’ve seen that look on his face, too, when he’s wrestling with some mechanical issue on the BMW or a piece of equipment.

We are a pair.

My brain was busy revisiting that Pamela’s Patterns Classic T-Shirt Dress:

I made a muslin of this last year. (I made several, actually.) At the time, I could not figure out why I couldn’t get it to fit. I used my measurements and checked the pattern against my bodice sloper, but when I donned the muslin, the entire top of the dress pushed up. Did I lengthen the bodice too much? Was the armscye too deep?

I have a new theory about why it didn’t fit. Can you see how gradually that hip curves out? I was so busy trying to get the top of the pattern to fit that I was ignoring the bottom half of the dress. And now that I know that the widest part of my hips is just below my waist, I am pretty sure that what was happening was that the bottom half of the dress was riding up in an attempt to get enough fabric around that area. A-line skirts do the same thing. The muslin is still hanging in my closet. I am going to try it on to see if I’m right.

This is a prime example of seeing a fitting issue but not knowing where the problem originates, and if you don’t know where it originates, you don’t know how to fix it. Someone with more experience likely could have identified it immediately, but I wasn’t at that point. I probably need a good skirt/pants sloper to go with my bodice sloper.

I am itching to get that pattern out, make the needed adjustments, and run up another muslin. If I have time to perfect the pattern before Sew Expo, I have some sparkly Robert Kaufman ponte in the stash that would make a great party dress. I have it in hot pink and a lovely periwinkle blue.

We’ll see. The first priority is getting class materials ready.

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We had a Pacific Northwest Mennonite Conference meeting yesterday morning. Our conference includes 24 churches in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. In the past, we’ve had this meeting in person, usually in Portland. (Some of my most harrowing driving experiences have been on the trip home from that meeting.) Since the pandemic, though, this meeting has been held on Zoom.

I offered to host a get-together for the meeting in my living room. I connected my laptop to the TV along with a microphone and a Bose speaker. I have to rig up a similar system for the homestead foundation board meeting tomorrow night so yesterday’s meeting was a good test run. Six of us gathered for the meeting and lunch. Four of us knitted our way through it. I made sausage and lentil soup, Miriam—our transitional pastor—brought rolls and fresh pineapple, and Elaine brought cookies.

My sewing area looks like a tornado went through there. I have class supplies strewn from one end to the other. I’ll clean it up this afternoon so that if I get some time later in the week, I can work on my party outfit.