Truly Victorian News Center

First off, let me just say "WHAT THE HECK WAS I THINKING!!?"

I spent most of Saturday and some of Sunday babysitting my ebroidery machine between doing lots of nothing.  I now have a whopping 3 yards of double ruffle strips. That is just about 1/2 of two ruffles.  Unfortunately, that doesn't add up to a whole ruffle. Good news, I should have 2 ruffles done by next weekend.  Bad news, at this pace it will be closer to 7 weeks to get a full seven rows of ruffles.

I am having an interesting problem with the embroidery.  The left hand side is staying straight and beautiful.  The right hand side is a problem child.   For some reason, it is traveling to the left, making the gap narrower and narrower.    My best efforts to combat the problem and move it back to the right are barely holding it straight.  Often failing to do even that.  It can't possibly by anything I am doing wrong, so I must concede that there is some intangible  flaw in the fabric that is causing the contant shift.   I only wish...  There must be a lighting issue or a perspective issue with my glasses that is making it impossible for me to line up the start/stop points correctly on the one side.    I really need to figure this out or I will run out of room between the ruffles.   Not to mention that is not following the stripe in the fabric at all.   Another issue, this is going to take a lot more thread than I anticipated.  I may have to order more, as I think there was only one spool left at the store.

I found 100 yards of yellow lace on Ebay.  I will have to gather it myself, but it should work out well.  I am almost hoping that I don't win the auction thought, as just after I placed my bid, I found and even better lace.  Story of my life.  I highly doubt that someone else out there is desperately looking for yellow lace to outbid me, but you never know.  I may decide to buy the other one anyway.  We'll see.  I also found a narrow yellow ribbon at Michaels, I might use it to top the ruffles.

Over the next week, I will keep plucking away at the ruffles.  Next weekend I will start on the bodice.    I know the main bodice pattern for the dress is good to go, but I really need to test my sleeves before I can release it as a pattern.  That is really the whole point to this dress, to test the sleeves.  So tell me again why I am spending 7 weeks on ruffles when all I need is sleeves?   OH yeah...  IT'S GOING TO LOOK AWESOME!!! Oh, please, please, let this be awsome.  If this dress suddenly turns into a pale blue silk, you'll know that something went horribly wrong.