until I get a cat! If everything goes right, the little fella will be home with me tomorrow afternoon!! I've been having trouble sleeping I'm so excited!

Because I've been getting everything ready these past days, I haven't posted about my progress on a dress I made. It's the sketch you can see here, and it's pretty much finished, except I didn't attach the sleeves yet, but I might once fall comes. 

I hope I'll get a chance to take proper pictures of the finished dress, because I forgot to photograph the most important part of the dress (at least for me personally): the back! Why the back you ask? Well, I have finally pushed myself to finally try shirring, and you know what? I don't know what I was so scared of!! It's so much easier than encasing elastic or something!

I shirred the waistband in the back to make it fit snugly, and I'm so happy I finally did this on a dress! There are so many dress designs I've drawn that never got further than a drawing cause I was so scared of shirring! And that's not the only new technique I tried! Since the skirt is a slight circle skirt I wanted to do a rolled hem or narrow hem, and I inspected my sewing machine feet closer and found that I had a narrow hem foot. Again, I don't know what took me so long! Ok, as with the shirring, I'm aware that I couldn't have done it a few years ago, I didn't have dem fine motor skills yet. But I've progressed so much over the last few years, it's like my brain didn't acknowledge that I'd improved and was still scared of harder techniques. I still went slow and the fabric slipped from the foot into a single fold twice, but other than that, I got a perfect hem!

It makes me wonder: how many other techniques (for lack of a better word?) are there that I'm scared to try, even though they're actually easy for me now?  Single and double welt pockets/buttonholes are the first thing I can think of, but I bet there's more that I'm not really aware of. Sewing with slippery fabrics? Chiffon? Do you do this too? Do you get "that technique is too hard for me" stuck in your head?

I have to say, even though the bodice on the dress is a little long and thus there's this balloon effect at my short waist (do you know what I mean?) , this dress has been a success, because I think it's helped me over a couple of insecurities I didn't know I had :)

Anyway, I'm off to cat-proof the house some more, and obsess about which type of kitty litter to get. Not to be dramatic, but: