Recently I got to feeling quite poorly, and after a bit of gritting my teeth and pressing on, I had to admit I was getting worse and needed to stop and recuperate. So I decided to take a week off. A week of not going out (except one quick lunch with Dad) or attempting to get anything done. And since I was too tired and fog-brained to get anything done anyway, it wasn’t hard to enforce.

For the first four days I poked around in tubs of fabric and patterns and enjoyed refreshing my memory on their contents. I vaguely wished I felt well enough to turn some of it into a thing, but it was nice to not be under any pressure to do anything. Simple, quick things like pattern weights and pressing hams were made.

By the fifth day I’d rallied enough to spread out fabric and patterns to check if there was enough of the former to attempt the latter. I made a few new matches and felt a bit excited by that.

By the sixth day I felt like I could possibly start making a garment, but the push and pull between what I was now excited about making and what I needed to be making before Christmas/New Year was paralysing. Eventually I decided to it was better to do something than nothing, so I took some fabric and cut out the pattern pieces for a shirt.

The fabric is weird. It looks like a cotton crepe, but the back appears to have a looser second layer. While it looks like it should have drape, it doesn’t. I’d attempted to make wide-legged pants but they’d looked like two stiff columns so I’d cut them up in the hopes I’d make something else one day. It is organic cotton, which was rare back in the distant shadows of time that I’d bought it, so I resisted tossing it into the recycling.

Almost every idea I’ve had to use it has been abandoned because the offcuts were too small. But I’d stumbled on a shirt pattern during my prostashtination that fit. Just.

On the seventh day, I sewed it up.

It is kinda see through. Which is less of a problem for a shirt than pants.