There’s something very sneaky about a mother’s words – they ring in your ears forever, even if you plug them up with your fingers and drink a lot of wine to forget.
I know this for a fact.
Which is why I now have this giant pile of thread and a stiff neck.
It all began with my plans to make Maddie a slip to match her beautiful drawers. If you read my previous post about not remembering how I’d sewn them, I can tell you the problem was solved with foresight. I had somehow thought, back when I made them, that this moment might arise. Rolled into the white yardage was a cutting scrap with it’s tiny tucks still intact.
It was easy enough to remove my stitches – to measure the spacing and see where I had, and had not, pulled threads. What wasn’t easy was getting motivated to do it again. Especially since three rows of tucks really aren’t enough for a whole slip. Visions of antique underthings filled my head, and they all involved a level of detail I dreaded creating.
That’s when I stuck my fingers in my ears.
Predictably, this was useless.
I could still hear my mother’s voice, loud and clear. “If it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing right.”
Ugh.
I had to ask myself the hard question, then. Which is this: What would the slip of an exceedingly spoiled doll look like?
“Well,” answered the smug part of my brain not responsible for any actual sewing, “it might look an awful lot like Felicity’s original petticoat.”
I hate that part of my brain, because it’s usually right and impossible to ignore. But if I want Maddie to have the wardrobe of a very spoiled doll, she deserves a very special slip. Even though it has eight rows of tucks, in two sizes. And if I want it to match the drawers, it has to have the pulled thread hem, too.
It took seven or eight solid hours to pull all those threads across a 36” piece of fabric.
And magnifiers. And several glasses of wine.
My mother had better be impressed.
You’ll find all the posts for this project HERE.
Maddie’s personal wardrobe page is HERE.