A Little Black Dress on a hanger

It's finished!

 

I finished it on Tuesday, half an hour before a concert I wore it to. (Sound familiar, fellow seamstresses, sewists, Sewasauri Re...whatever the plural of "rex" is?)

It was a classical concert in a small local venue. I sat in the last row and still got a perfect view and perfect sound. Four people; two played oboe and English horns, one played bassoon (called "fagot" in Czech - I wonder where that difference comes from?), one played spinet (which is not the same as cembalo, no matter what my online dictionary says) and piano. There was one piece by Mozart, one by Händel, others by composers I have not heard about before. It was one of those occasions you wish could go on forever. (And of course they don't...) The musicians were rather taken aback by our enthusiastic applause. And they've travelled the world with their music. Nice to see small town audience still has its perks.

Anyway - I finished the dress. It may need some tweaks here and there, but as it is, it's still one of the most detailled and perfected things I've sewn to date. Even though it's so simple. And I'm happy about my neat topstitched facings and partly handpicked zipper (that took some figuring out, and was the thing I was finishing half an hour before the concert) and that lovely neckline and shaped sleeves and pleated skirt. But I can't show you much of it, because right now it's cloudy and there's no good photographing light to be had. When there is, I'll do a proper photoshoot. I think this dress deserves it.

Also, it looks great with the Madeline hat - but it's not the sort of thing you'd wear to an evening concert. I'll probably wear it to a wedding on Saturday, though. (A man from our congregation's getting married.)

And I love the pattern, and want to use it over and over and over, with variations in the neckline, sleeves, skirt and colour. I want to make a Little Brown Dress, a Little Blue Dress, a Little Beige Dress... any more Bs you know of? A Little White Dress - that's a B in Czech...

Enough of dresses for now! This transitional period when we switch the heating off and on and off again, when one day it's warm inside and the other it goes cold, because it's colder outside than we expected - that reminds me I wanted to sew myself pyjamas from the cotton flannel I got way back in the beginnings of this blog, together with the Very Pink Poplin of Doom and other fabrics.

Oh, and then also this:

 

I've got turquoise and teal flannel. Hopefully there's enough of it to make a pyjama top and bottoms, each in one fabric and bias-bound in the other colour.

And one more good news - well, for me! I got The Czar's Madman by Jaan Kross in a secondhand bookshop today. One of my favourite historical novels - for 5 CZK, just (I guess) because it's in Slovakian. I've read so many books (mostly Agatha Christie's) in Slovakian that that's no problem for me. Score!