Still no garments made this year...

 Ok, I still have no real sewing to report.  I have been mending all the facemasks....where the bendy bit has worn through or broken, and a tedious business THAT is...and I have worked hard, if not too successfully, at reviving a lost art:  Darning socks.

I remember in the last year of my grandmother's life she moved around between my mom & dad's house and that of my dad's siblings, as she was dealing with cancer treatments that left her really not able to care for herself.   But one thing she did while she was at my parents' house, at least, was darn socks.  I remember going to visit when The Princess was about 5 months old and being astonished at the incredible work done on the toes of relatively cheap socks.  But my grandmother was of the 'make it do or do without' generation, so she darned the socks.  I, however, bought socks that were so cheap it made more sense to throw them out when they got holes in the toes...which they did at a truly ridiculous rate.  But, fast forward mumbledy mumbledy years and I have become enamored of cushy and supportive and ...expensive... socks.  Socks that don't wear through the 2nd or 3rd time you wear them.  But...even these wear through at some point, and they are definitely worth the effort to darn.

Even if I am terrible at it.

Case in point:

 Sigh.  At least no one will see the toes.  It might help if I had an actual darning knob; I put them over a laundry detergent measuring cup cap.  It worked...sort of.  

 I have also washed my 'MOB Dress' rayon crepe, and I discovered something when I pulled it out of the dryer...

(hanging lengthwise)

 

(Hanging crosswise)

That print is actually horizontally oriented!  The more I look at it the more I think I'm going to have to cut the dress out on the cross grain, just so those twiggy things look...right.

And I am going out on a bit of a limb for the pattern.  I wanted something with a bit of a vintage vibe but a trip to JoAnn's didn't really turn up exactly what I was looking for.  So I dug through the pattern stash and found a dress pattern that I made up sometime in the 1998 - 2000 time frame (the copyright date is 1997).  I loved that dress and wore it and wore it until some weird something happened and it got a hard, melty place in it (it was rayon crepe...so go figure).  I don't know what it was but it was truly tragic.  HOWEVER, it is the size I wore 20 years ago...

I'ma gonna hafta size that puppy up a little bit, ahem.  But this is the closest I could find to the  dress I want, so we'll see if my fitting skills are up to the task.

And we'll also have to see if I can find appropriate buttons.  I may be scouring the internet.  I really have not had much luck looking for buttons; all the sites seem to be so hard to navigate.  I just want to search for, say, 3/4" blue buttons, but...for some reason that isn't very searchable.  

I have a wee bit of unselfish sewing to do, and I have at least ONE thing my wardrobe needs desperately, but maybe by the weekend I can see about altering up this pattern to fit the current bod.  I do seem to remember that it was generously...maybe even excessively...blessed with ease, so perhaps I won't have to add as much as I expect.  We shall see.