Fancy Dress Fixin's

This year's Quest Force Awards dinner is a masquerade...formal dress, with a mask, not a costume. The Princess gave The Flute Player a fancy mask for Christmas, so, of course, The Flute Player desires a dress that will match her mask, which is purple, silver and black.

I had hopes of running down a grey/purple cross weave taffeta...hence the road trip to Sir's. I knew it was a shot in a million, but, well, I had to try.

They had three cross woven fabrics; orange/brown, orange/lime green and red/blue, but no grey/purple.

And they had a table full of lovely woolens, including a couple of very nice boucles, that I drooled over. I picked up a couple of other pieces...black/white stripe cotton/lycra jersey and a black/gold pinstripe cotton/lycra shirting...and carried them around a while before I shook myself into remembering that this trip was JUST for the dress. But the only thing they had that would work was bridal satin...and I just couldn't do a dry-clean-only fabric. So we had lunch at Cahoots and headed back south.

We hit paydirt at Hobby-Lobby; they had a good selection of (washable!) crepe-backed satin and we found both the purple to match her mask and a nice silver to go along with it. Back to Hancock's for the patterns and for trim and notions and then we headed home.

I tried to get her to let me do a variation on last year's dress, but it was to no avail. She wanted something more sophisticated, and she wanted sleeves. I thought a sleeveless dress w/a shrug would be nice, but as we perused patterns looking for a shrug she spotted the shorter, flared skirt dress in Simplicity 2251 and it was all over but the begging.

Fortunately, it comes as small as a 4, so I *think* it won't take too much alteration to make it work.

It had better not; the dinner is Feb. 26...a week from Friday...