love child

in which our plucky heroine realises that her new pinafore appears to be the love child of carhartt and crinoline...

The style of this pinafore is rather industrial blue collar, between the heavy black denim, tack button fastenings and riveted pockets.

The skirt shape, however, due to the same heavy black denim, and exacerbated by the multi-layered hand stitched trim which is acting rather like horsehair braid, is quite reminiscent of mid-century New Look, or of young Kate in The Good Master in the chapter where she puts on traditional womens clothing. I am rather charmed by the resulting dissonance.

Lil Nina continues to prove her value as a member of the household, as gradually the various possibilities in the machine become apparent. There are six buttonholes in this pinafore. Nina not only has an automatic buttonhole function, but the brain to keep the settings in memory and continue stitching each one to an identical length until told to stop. Whoo Hoo! This is a big improvement over my former regular machine, which did make buttonholes, but had to be guided through the process each time. (that was, in turn, a huge improvement over making buttonholes by hand, which takes me at least a half hour per)

Completing this has the black/grey half of my SWAP complete, and leaves me with four or five additional garments to finish before 30 April; it also has my springtime 6PAC halfway done, with an additional three garments. Fortunately, my plans are that the same pieces will work for both. One more pinafore (indigo blue denim), one more top, and probably a dress rather than an additional pinafore and top.

My current thinking is to do something make a dress with these Japanese cotton fabrics, and to use the Eura dress pattern layout to make a loose dress reminiscent of some of the clothes in Japanese pattern books. That layout is entirely zero-waste, which is good since there is not very much of the fabric, and it will be an easy thing to have it fit me, since former SCA undergowns were made in the same style.

:::

first heard this song probably over 40 years ago...