Last week was Spring Break in these parts, and I’d love to be able to say that Caitlyn and I did all sorts of amazing things. Instead, I had a cold. Not a bad one, just enough to slow me down and make me tired all the time. At one point I had kicked around the notion of heading east-ish for a day hike during Caitlyn’s time off school. We settled for an outing to KidzBounce for nearly two hours of bouncy houses.
The highlight of the week off, though, was a production of Cats. For better or worse, I sang songs from the show to Caitlyn when she was a baby (Did she stop fussing because I was singing or pacing?) and she’s had the soundtrack album as part of her music collection since she could handle a CD; she knows the music and has a favorite cat (Skimbleshanks). We didn’t tell her we were going, just headed downtown, walked to the theatre and let her figure it out. Her happy dance is pretty good.
And she got to wear a new dress!
I really wanted to finish this for Easter, but it just didn’t happen. It’s McCall’s 6062, and while it’s not a hard dress to make, it does have lot of parts and a lot of gathering!
I bought the pattern a couple years ago, when she was smaller, so I was a bit concerned about the sizing now, even going so far a to make a muslin for the bodice. Holding up the pattern tissue felt so inconclusive! In the end, I did do a bit of pattern grading, mostly to move the waist down, since Caitlyn is so tall for her age.
If I were to do it again, I think I’d try to take in the waist a bit. The ties in the back are nice but there’s a lot of skirt that gets bunched together there. I may still try to do some shirring (which will be a totally new thing) with some elastic thread to at least make the bunching even.
Maybe it’s the colors or maybe it’s the two layer skirt, but this dress came out a bit more on the fancy side of things than I was really planning or expecting. It’s a great thing to wear out for a evening at the theatre (“Growltiger was a Bravo Cat who traveled on a barge…”), but I’m having a really hard time seeing it as standard school-and-playground wear.
Fortunately, I’ve got much more basic things all cut out for KCWC. Of course, with the break last week, I’m behind in everything else now…