I tried it on!

I hope you had a great Memorial Day.  We had a very busy, tiring but good day.  We woke up early and with the help of 8 or 9 church friends, we were able to saw down our neighbor's tree.  A giant chunk of it had fallen in a very bad storm we had last week.  She's a single mother of 5 and couldn't afford to do anything about it.  We mulched what we could and cut the branches into firewood.  The trunk is still in her yard (we can't do anything about that but at least she and we don't have to worry about the damage the rest of the tree falling would have.  Took 5 hours.  Well, actually, it's not done as there is a large pile of branches sitting in our yard but people were too exhausted to continue.  We finished at 12:45.  We had a gang of people coming over at 1 for a bbq lunch.  We were planning on eating outside under that giant tree and its shade...but there was no shade anymore.  So we just ate inside.  

My mother-in-law, brother-in-law and his family, neighbors who are like grandparents to my husband and his siblings and a family of family friends came.  Their 16 year old daughter was in a serious car accident 3 months ago.  The doctors didn't think she'd make it.  She had a broken eye socket, brain injury, broken ankle, broken back and lost several feet of her intestines.  She was in a coma for 5 days.  But she is recovering quite nicely. She's fairly traumatized from her experience and is finding it difficult to cope with her new reality but was in good spirits during the visit at least.  They are a neat family.  

After the visit I managed to get my house back in order, go weed in the garden a little and then work on the sleeves of my dress a bit.  

The bodice is not finished yet.  It still needs piping around the waist and the arm holes, the back needs to be hemmed and have the hooks and eyes added, the side/front panel seams need to be handstitched in the ditch to the lining, and the neckline will need hemming.  It is done enough that I was able to finally try it on though and to my relief, it does fit!

The unfinished back

I love these lines!

Finally, it's on!  (It was midninght and I was falling asleep but had to finish it enough to get it tried on.)

So now I am moving on to the sleeves even though I'm not quite finished with the bodice.  The sleeves, while they don't have lining, will be thick since there are three sleeves stacked on top of each other in varying lengths.  

This is the macheron (the cap sleeve).  It gets three deep tucks and each tuck will have piping on the bottom of each tuck. So I'm doing basting stitches to make the folding easier.

Since the pattern has dropped sleeves and I had no idea how low the drop was, I couldn't tell if I would need to add length to the sleeve or not.  So now that I was able to try on the bodice, we pinned the sleeve to it to check.  I added 4 inches which will give me the length I need plus hemming room.  The black piping is where it ended before my addition.  The piping will make it appear intentional, I hope. ;o)  And the oversleeve is in place.  Just need a mancheron.