Finally! First finished dress

I finally finished the dress pattern I've mentioned a million times, and here's my first dress from using it. This picture was taken in the organized chaos that is my sewing room (or, as Rob would say, "our rec room," but he'd be wrong). It's based on BurdaStyle's Danielle dress with a few modifications. It still needs some work, but isn't so bad for the first one. I have quite a few more in the queue...

Do you recognize this fabric? It's from the 60th anniversary quilt that my aunt and I made for my grandparents. I ended up not having to piece the back because the top wasn't more than 44" wide, so had a good yard and a half left over. Sweet. All I chipped in to this dress (other than thread and time) is a button and less than a yard of white double-face satin ribbon from my stash. It's quite possibly the cheapest dress I've ever made.

Remember my list of stuff I wanted to accomplish last weekend? Well, I made quite a bit of progress. Let's have a look at my list from Friday, shall we? I've grayed out the things that were accomplished.

• We have breakfast at Red's one of those mornings
• I finish my dress
• I cut and sew the muslin for a new Built By Wendy skirt from Sew U
• More Dear Jane progress
• I sew the Sew U skirt ?
• kitty snuggles
• I kick Rob's ass in poker
• We watch more Deadwood

Not bad, really. I did make the muslin for my new skirt, only shortened the length (it just may be true, what everyone says: Built By Wendy has the best patterns), and then cut my fabric for my first skirt using that pattern. That is something I hope to whip together tonight, but that will all depend on my energy level upon reaching the homestead. There were no kitty snuggles over the weekend due to it being nearly 90* in the apartment. Yuck. I also did not kick Rob's ass in poker. We ended up at Jenn and Daniel's after a showing of Dark Knight (there's a new Batman movie out--maybe you've already heard??) and a yummy dinner of Mexican food. I was the first to go out with my chips, but Rob wasn't too far behind me.

I made some progress on my Dear Jane but haven't quite finished the square, so I haven't updated my counts yet. Also, I made some progress on an upcoming mini quilt I've been thinking about forever. It's inspired by the book Bits and Pieces, about making mini-quilts from scraps. I have this whole idea about doing a series of mini-quilts and hanging them in the stairwell heading up to our apartment. I also have the idea to hand-stitch and hand-quilt them all in an effort to practice and improve my technique. The materials are things I already have, so if for any reason these mini-quilts look horrible, I'll only be out time and thread.