Plumber’s Paradox

I only sew (super-crazy-stretchy) knits, so how odd is it that I skipped The Monthly Stitch’s “Sew Stretchy” May?

For newcomers, The Monthly Stitch is an Australian sewing blog, to which I’m a regular contributor. Each month they vote on some new challenge, and finished products are posted on the blog. Being Australia, skating a very big there — and being the only skating dress designer and one of only a handful of US participants makes it even more fun to participate.

So this month was “Amnesty Month,” a chance for folks to re-do a past challenge or submit something they finished too late in the month to post.  While I actually sewed more than a dozen figure skating dresses in May, the business was so crazy-busy that I never posted anything during the PERFECT challenge for me, “Sew Stretchy” May.

The oddest part of that insane month was that none of those outfits were for my own daughter. We often laugh ironically at how the Plumber’s Paradox works in this house (you know…the pipes in a plumber’s house are always leaking, the mechanic’s own car is broken down, the chef’s family eats take-out, etc.). I have probably 60 figure skating dresses being worn in the world at any one given time these days, but my own child had only one dress to wear to practice.  Every. Single. Day.

I figured I needed to remedy this embarrassing (and honestly stinky) situation, so in honor of Amnesty Month, I made her a couple new pieces to wear to practice. These are not competition outfits so no one really cares what they look like, but I’m not going to sell very many dresses if my own child’s stuff is dull and boring, so we spiced it up a little bit.

The dress is made of a nice matte spandex I’ve started carrying here in my shop — super stretchy, but without the cheap-looking sheen that the older girls sometimes detest. It’s very soft and comfortable, which is a huge plus in your third hour of practice without air conditioning. It has a couple of stretch mesh inserts, and about a gross of leftover pink stones that have been hanging around the shop for way too long — the stones are a terrific color, but this specific color isn’t being made anymore so I’ve spent the last couple of years looking for a good excuse to use them up.

 

 

The white straps which don’t really match the rest of the dress give away the dirty secret…I wanted to surprise her with the dress, so rather than actually measure her, I cut/sewed the whole thing one day while she was at school. I have a set of measurements and a pattern I made for her in May, and I figured she couldn’t have grown that much in four months.  Uh, wrong.  She was surprised — not so much by the dress itself, but by how much skin and underwear and various body parts it showed. So I cut it up, got rid of the white stripes that originally adorned the front, reworked the design, and since it’s just a practice dress, I went ahead and re-used the white straps anyway…no sense in wasting perfectly good elastic and perfectly fitted spandex straps (a rarity), right?

So this is the finished product. Nothing fancy, but extremely comfortable (which she loves) and extremely NOT the one practice dress she’s been wearing daily for a year (which I and everyone else within smelling distance love).

Hoping to post some other designs from our crazy summer soon…