Silly weather, Trix are for kids!

Florida is rather fickle in the "wintertime." Yesterday the high was 87 and I frolicked around in shorts and a t-shirt [ok, I didn't frolic, but it's a nice picture, yes?]. Today the high is 66. What is that all about?

[And no, the Trix in the title is just for giggles, I've never eaten Trix in my life, as my mother only allowed us healthy cereals while growing up]

So needless to say I've opened all the windows in my apartment. Which are conveniently all in my sewing space [yeah, when I move in a couple months one of my requirements is that windows be spread out more]. I have quite a plan of things to tackle for today!

First off, I have a wedding to attend in a week from tomorrow. A beach wedding. I've never attended one of those, and shoes are optional, and I'm not sure what to wear. So of course I'm trying to make a dress.

This dress:

Except minus the contrasting yoke. But keeping the belt.

So this being my 3rd time tracing a clothing pattern onto fabric I really wanted it to be not a painful process. Aka, I didn't want to have to trace onto other paper to then trace onto the fabric. Lo and behold...

I dug around in my grandma's sewing boxes, and found this Dritz tracing paper. I haven't even the foggiest as to how old it is, but my grandma passed away 7 years ago, and she was too sick to do much clothing making since I was really little. So I'm going to say this is probably at least 18 year old tracing paper. But apparently it doesn't have a shelf life, because it still works great.

I have several pattern tracing wheels that I also found in the box [including my mom's from when she learned to make clothing, about 40 years ago], and I had a variety of colors to choose from: white, red, blue, green, lime, yellow, and orange.

I chose red because it was the easiest to see on the crosshatch pattern of the fabric. But because I'm afraid the red might stain, I only marked the outlines with it, and I will be going back to add all the matching points, button markings, and dart lines in something else. 

If you enlarge this photo you should be able to see faint red markings from the pattern piece outline.

This all boils down to the fact that this is now my favorite tool. Tracing paper. My new best friend. Oh, it made the process so much easier quicker. I cut all the pieces out in about 30 minutes, which also accounted for me figuring out the best layout and testing and deciding which color tracing paper to use. AND if that wasn't good enough, after I cut each piece out, I flipped them over to the wrong side, and wrote on the back which piece it was by just writing onto the tracing paper. No pinned pieces of paper necessary!

Do you hear angels singing? I do.

I'm a little short on the crosshatch twill, since I forgot I'd need extra if I wasn't doing a contrasting yoke, so I have to go back to the store to get just a bit more. But I also need to decide which fabric to use as my belt. And let's face it, that's really the most important decision.

So my day will spent trying to figure out how I can make my dress look just a smidge less nice than the bride ;)

Enjoy your Saturday!