






Finished at last!
The little dress for Sweetie with a knitted top and soft printed baby corduroy for the skirt. I hadn’t been able to find a pattern in the shops or online that had a knitted bodice and fabric skirt and then I came across this little book in The Works.

I had to alter it a bit at the back to make it a fastening bodice (the back bodice on the pattern is in one piece and slips over the head – but I wasn’t sure it was going to be easy to do that so split the bodice into two halves and added a button and buttonhole band. The sleeve head too didn’t work out with their instructions but I managed to rectify this by decreasing on every other row which in effect made the sleeve head longer and fit the armhole better.
With the gloomy weather I have been struggling to do the hand sewing to finish the dress. At first it was meant for her birthday last November, but that didn’t happen. Never mind, I thought, I will finish it and give it to her for Christmas……but then we had to go and attend to the cottage roof unexpectedly and the dress had to be put on one side. This week has been the first opportunity to get back to it.
Yesterday we picked up the table and chairs, it was a fine sunny day which helped, and amazingly all the packages fit into the car with just enough room to spare for a couple of small Ikea purchases (for more improvements which I will mention another time). DH assembled the table and unboxed all the chairs. This morning we put our old pine farmhouse table into the boot of the car and took it round to my brothers house. He already has some very nice farmhouse style chairs so our old chairs will go to whoever would like them, we will try the local charities and maybe Facebook Marketplace. We have had them for 45 years and we didn’t buy them in the first place they were left for us in the first house we bought. In fact I have never had any new dining chairs so it was nice to be able to choose my own. The ones we had have served us well though and been recovered a number of times over the years to match our changing decor.
Everything seemed to be going well, even my daughter’s problem that she informed us about in an urgent phone call on Monday has resolved, but then we hit another car problem in addition to the automatic brake not kicking in when it should and the engine warning light coming on after going through every little puddle (unavoidable at the moment with all this rain). Today DH went to refill the screen wash in his car. At first he struggled to get the bonnet to open….once open he put in the screen wash but then couldn’t get the bonnet to fasten properly no matter what he did! He phoned our usual garage but he is really busy and can’t even look at it until Monday when we will be in North Yorkshire visiting mum and daughter. DH had no option other than to have another look at it himself and eventually after a few more attempts managed to get it closed but it will need some attention and maybe a new catch. Presumably the nice garage man will add it to the list!
I keep feeling really ‘off colour’ at the moment…it could be stress…too many problems bombarding us! I need a few days of calm.