The school swimming carnival was four weeks ago!  Four weeks ago, in what feels like a different world and different lifetime.  Clare is in year 12 (final year of high school), so instead of having to wear PE uniform this year she got to dress according to a house ‘theme’.  Clare is in Clare House and their house colour is white.   The theme chosen was ‘goddess’. Out with the sheets!

We have plenty of old white sheets in the cupboard, and I remembered that there was a free pattern online for a Grecian Sundress. I printed it out and cut it out at the smallest size. The main challenge was gathering the shoulders enough – I should have just done casings and threaded through some cord to pull it up tight; normal gathering with two rows of thread just wasn’t strong enough to pull tight enough gathers in this sheet. In the end I did a running stitch through it by hand with doubled thread so that I could manipulate the gathers more and tighten them.

It was cool in the morning when they headed off to the carnival, so Clare layered a white tee that I’d made some years earlier underneath. I was pretty impressed with the waist shirring. My sewing machine generally doesn’t like to shir, but I remembered that if I reduced the bobbin tension about a quarter of a turn, it would be okay. And it was! Although I had to refill the bobbin about four times in order to do that amount of shirring. Tedious.

The girls had lots of fun at the carnival; Stella managed to find herself a job as mascot for her house.

This is actually a rather lovely, simple dress pattern. Although this one is very much a costume, I’ll pull out the pattern again and sew it up in a proper dress fabric at some stage. Clare really likes a bit of shirring, and is very pleased that I’ve figured out how to do it effectively on my sewing machine.