…cosplay fail…

What is it that they say about roads paved with good intentions? Every project starts with the most fabulous of intentions, and then, somewhere along the way they just pushed aside or stored for later… or sometimes they are just a total fail that I hang on to for far too long. Craft blogging has a tendency to become a showcase of fabulous projects, so in pursuit of honesty and transparency, it’s really only fair to share the less successful projects…

Early on in our homeschooling days, the time came around for when the children would have had their book fair at school. Somehow, I managed to get myself talked into making costumes and going to the local indie bookshop to pick out a book. And by “costumes”, I mean for all four children AND myself. I spent a week madly sewing…and in the end, gave up and we just went book shopping sans costumes. Then came homeschool group book week, and I had grand intentions once more. And again, we were sewing at the last minute, literally, right up until the time we walked out the door.

When we first started planning costumes the first time around, and hit up the fabric shop, my first port of call was the clearance bin. While I didn’t have much luck for the children, I did find a dusky pink lining fabric, and a sheer, pre-hemmed curtain fabric, both of which I could easily use to create a regency style dress. In true Barefoot style, I was totally winging it.

The bodice, I wanted to create a heavily gathered style, so cut the neckline as deep as I thought it needed to be, and then doubled the width, to give me plenty of fabric to gather, and then hold in place with top stitching the neckline, and attaching the waistband.

When contemplating the skirt, I figured pleats would be more flattering than gathers, to a create a flat front…apparently this was a fail since while Master 12 was taking the photo of me in the dress, he told me it looked like I had a baby in my tummy!! Possibly not quite the look I was going for…

With the bodice and skirt formed, the problems began piling up. The waist was too loose thanks to allowing too much ease, in trying to make it comfortable to slip up over my hips. An easy fix was to insert some elastic in the rear half of the waistband. Then the arm holes were too tight – and I’d already cut the sleeves to fit. From the last of the fabric. So I canned the layers of puffed sleeves in favour of a sleeveless dress, and I would just wear a fitted tee underneath it. Then I didn’t have a zip, and was running out time to buy one. So I top-stitched the two sides of the back, which were open at that point, with the intention of using velcro for the closure instead. But then THAT plan came unstuck when I factored in my stupid broad back, and the dress’s sudden inability to do up…

So into the Basket Of Doom it went, there to be ignored in favour of projects that actually worked out. The past few weeks though, I have been forced, after a solid 18 months of determinedly ignoring said Basket(s. Yes, there were baskets in the plural. It wasn’t my finest moment having to actually deal with them and realise how much crap I have), to face up to the reality that they can not be ignored any longer if I wished to move to our one-day farm house. And so, into the basket I went. Out of the basket came the dress. I tried it on. Again. It didn’t fit across the back (too small) or the waist (too big). So I pressed the 12 year old into service as the Instagram Child, and snapped a couple of photos for posterity before consigning it, finally, to the rubbish bin.

Of course, once the truckabin had been and gone and taken the dress to it’s final resting place, I came up with what should have been an obvious solution to start with…LACE UP BACK. There was a bit of face palming at that, but after the initial twinge of declutterer’s remorse, I am actually glad I didn’t think of it before. It means one less thing to pack and store and unpack and find somewhere to put in the new house, considering I would have worn it maybe just the once. It was fun in theory. In practice I feel much better with the decision having been made.

Today has been a school catch up day, after travels and various goings on last week put a bit of a hole in our plans. We have two new board games we picked up in the toy shop’s closing down sale that have needed testing out (even though they were supposed to be for Christmas #whoops), and new books all round that we picked up in the book shop’s closing down sale that have demanded reading. I’ve got a dress idea I’m chewing over. The two big boys are about to abscond with their grandmother for a sleepover, and then the two littles and I need to do a grocery pick up (huzzah for click and collect), and maybe sort of kind of accidentally fall into the fabric shop to pick up some binding and a zip to finish off a bag I started on the weekend. Possibly by the time we get home they might be in the mood for a cheeky weekday cartoon viewing sesh while mummy squeezes in a cheeky pre-dinner sewing sesh. I need to download a couple of podcasts or a new audiobook for while I sew (any recs?). Dinner is sorted thanks to leftovers needing only some noodles added to jazz it up into a new meal, and the mister has a meeting, so the evening is looking promising for early bedtimes and more sewing and hooking into my current book. As far as Mondays go? Yeah, we’ll call it a win.