Anyway, so I long ago drank the Koolaid and learned to love layers. As such, all of my garb, basically, requires me to wear an inner dress and an outer dress to look right – if I skip the outer dress I look like a peasant, if I skip the underdress i’m running around with visibly bare arms. This won’t do at ALL. I have one dress which I *can* wear without the undergown, as it has closed sleeves (and it’s even unlined! in other words, it was actually made for Pennsic, though I’ve never been QUITE warm enough to wear it without the supportive layer underneath.)

So, obviously, I need more garb like this. I’m still not thrilled with this, as honestly that’s more closed-sleeve dresses than I want to have, but it’ll work. My first one is going to be based on this dress:
though with a wildly different color scheme, as I found some black/white mini-checked tropical wool I had forgotten I bought. I think I meant to make a GFD with it, as those always look interesting in slightly patterned fabric, but ah well. Unlined and with just a supportive smock underneath, it should be as cool as Roman etc. I have 5 yards of the fabric in question, maybe closer to 5.5 since it’s fabric.com and I ordered 5, so that gives me an extra 15”.

Enter my trusty Visio/analog. (Actually on the Mac I use Conceptdraw, but same idea. Really Visio’s the one piece of software I wish would get ported win->mac, but I digress again.) So here’s the layout:

For some reason the labels don’t show up, but the purple is the body pieces, light blue is gores, and dark blue is sleeves. I have an existing gown pattern I can impose on the body pieces for shoulder/bust line preliminary fitting.

Only question is what color shall I make the dags, and should I put faux “underdress cuffs” on the bottom of the sleeves? Am leaning towards blue, but will have to see what’s in the stash, and decide how much work I want to put in this. My other one has cut dags, , which is easier in the “I don’t have to hem these” sort of way, but requires a fairly significantly difference in fabric weight between the dress and the dags…

Hmm, I guess I also have to decide whether I need to lace the bust at all – am leaning against, given how scoop necked it is I suspect I can move it out of the way for nursing, but will have to see…

As I was blockaded in my sewing room for much of the weekend, I listened to a lot more music than usual. And as a confession? My music taste hasn’t really changed that much since, well, high school. This is kind of sad. Not to mention it was getting a bit repetitive…

So, people with better music taste than I, what should I be listening to that’s come out in the last 5-10 years, since I quit listening to the radio? My taste in music runs slightly angsty, leaning heavily on Tori Amos and Better than Ezra, but ranging as far as Disturbed/Korn/etc into the “harder” rock side of things… not so much into folksy, definitely not into country at ALL.

(And yes, I know about Pandora, but I’m hoping for more personal suggestions…)

Enter www.fashionfabricsclub.com. Not that I should link to them, because I heartily do NOT recommend them, but anyway. They had what was described on their website as “100% wool, herringbone weave suiting” in an appropriate blue, for a slightly-high but reasonable price. So I ordered it.

It is NOT NOT NOT NOT 100% wool. The burn test sparkled, bubbled, certainly wasn’t self-extinguishing (I almost burned my fingers) and left a crushable black bead. Survey says? Acrylic content, and not insignificant. Or maybe nylon, I’m not good at telling the smell difference, though I don’t think it’s poly as the bead WAS crushable. Certainly not pure burning hair, that’s for sure.  In fact, the people I’ve shown the fabric? Can see it’s not pure wool on sight.Not without looking closely, but STILL.

Perhaps needless to say, I am *pissed*. If you note the date, I do NOT have time to send this fabric back and buy something new, not and have time to sew it.  But as this is not the first time what I ordered and what I received were not the same, I called them.

The customer service girl was nice, and took it straight to the owner. Apparently they pulled the bolt, burn tested it themselves, and had the GALL to say that “worsted wool bubbles”.  Um, whaaa? Worsted’s just a spinning technique, not an excuse for having impure fabrics (unless maybe they just plastic coated all the threads? and at that point, can they REALLY say it’s 100% anything?)

So yeah, should have  known better than to order from them, but here’s hoping the post saves someone else…

So yeah. Don’t buy fabric there.