Alice is at it again

I rolled up at church yesterday and started putting food out (because we have a church lunch on the first Sunday of the month, usually, though for reasons that weren't entirely clear we didn't in May); and pretty much the first thing that happened was that our pastor's wife handed me Alice's dress, so yay for her. She said it all went fine apart from the collar facing, and that's underneath the collar so it's not as if it's going to show anyway. But, of course, it is a very versatile pattern, not just an Alice dress; I can't tell whether the dress in the feature photo has a collar at all, but it certainly does have a different sleeve variation.

Meanwhile, I am still... very, very slowly, or at least that's how it feels... working on the petticoat. I thought it would be a breeze. I'd forgotten the trimming... the interminable trimming. Oh, great Scott. There's three metres of it.

It's not that it's in any way difficult. I cut two lengths of the white lawn and sewed them together widthways to make a very full skirt; two lengths of the dress net; and just one of the lining. When I was explaining this to my mother on the phone, she asked why, which just proves how long it is since she did any dressmaking (she used to do quite a lot of it when we were children). I explained that the lining doesn't have to be bouffant. The only reason for the lining is to ensure the net doesn't scratch Alice's legs or wreck her tights (they're not actually hers, in any case - they belong to our White Rabbit, who has everything you could imagine, including, mind-bogglingly, a pack of A3-sized playing cards). So one length of that is fine; it still needs to be gathered to fit. But, once I'd sewn up the lawn, I realised I'd better trim it before I did anything with the other two layers, so I could be sure I had the length right. It took most of last week; admittedly it wasn't all I was doing. I was also spending some time making earrings and doing business admin kind of stuff, including getting myself onto Pinterest. (I mean. There's no reason not to. I have exceedingly pinnable earrings and it's free advertising. But I've never used it before, and it turned out to be more work than I was expecting.) And on Friday I realised that if I didn't make banana bread pretty much right there and then, the bananas were going to become unusable very quickly. It's been a little bit too warm lately, and that isn't ideal for bananas that you want to be overripe but still edible. So I made that and stuck it in the freezer; and, of course, I spent quite a large chunk of Saturday making stuff for the church lunch.

But on Saturday night I finally finished the trimming, so now I'm over the worst of it. All I have to do now is: check the netting and trim a bit off it if necessary; sew it up at the sides; ditto ditto the lining, which will be quicker as there's only one seam (also a hem, true, but not such an outfacingly long one); gather the lawn and the netting to match the lining; sew on the waistband; and insert a length of elastic. We have a lot of elastic. I thought we were going to need it for the Caterpillar, but the Caterpillar (as I think I mentioned earlier) found a light blue fuzzy costume from somewhere, so that's fine. There's a bit of blue fabric left over from the dress, so I think I may do a self belt as well if I have time, as the pinafore won't cinch it quite as well as I'd originally thought.

Other than that, something interesting happened at the church lunch. I think I've mentioned that we have a lot of Ukrainians, and I happened to be sitting with one of them over lunch. As we were chatting, I noticed that she was wearing a Ukrainian flag ring. It was very simple, and it was made from beads - one round of blue and one of yellow, both on elastic, and linked together somehow. So, of course, I said, "Oh! I could make Ukrainian flag earrings!"

She thought this was a great idea. I explained that I have three styles at the moment, and I thought the one which would be best suited to it would be the one with the trefoils (I deliberately didn't say "1920s style" because she's quite young, so I wasn't sure she'd know what I meant). At this, her eyes lit up at once.

"Trefoils," she said. "Do you know what those mean?"

"No," I replied. (By which I meant that I didn't know what they meant to her, specifically; I'm aware of a number of possible meanings for trefoils, primarily Trinitarian symbolism, but I'm pretty sure that's originally Celtic, and I strongly suspected they were going to mean something else in Ukraine.)

"They mean freedom," she replied.

OK. I was right. I'd never come across that particular one before. But it was obviously the perfect symbolism for a pair of Ukrainian flag earrings.

I'm pretty sure I have the right beads; blue is quite a popular colour, yellow less so, but there are always going to be some people who do want yellow, so I have yellow beads. Not the MiniDuos which make up the trefoils themselves, so those are going to be blue, but I think I can do yellow for most of the rest, so that the trefoils stand out nicely; I have no yellow bugle beads, but I do have two shades of blue, so that'll work fine.

So I'm going to make those later today, and then I'll go back to sewing up that whacking great bouffant petticoat and hope I'm in a fit state to get to rehearsal on Thursday night. If so, then with a little bit of luck you should get a photo of Alice in full dress on Friday morning.

I'd better get the White Rabbit to bring the tights!