Bad Dress Florence & the neck creases

Every now and then I've come across the username Badskirt Amy on Flickr and always thought what a fantastic name that is (I've just looked into it again and seen that Amy has a blog named Badskirt too). I'm unsure of the history of the name, but I'm now wondering whether she once had a skirt-making experience that was so tragic that she decided to start a blog about it. I've decided that this dress isn't so bad that I need to rename my blog after it, but feel it is certainly worthy of a post title in honour of its badness.

You might remember that I made a dress from Wendy's Home Stretch book a while ago that I was really pleased with. Shortly after I decided to take my beloved Liberty jersey yardage and make it into a similar dress....only when I'd finished I realised that I loathed it and what I'd loved in plain navy with mustard binding, I really didn't like at all in lovely Liberty jersey - the fit was different and it didn't work with the busyness of the pattern. So I took the entire thing apart, raised the waist line to just beneath the bust and drafted a new sleeve so that I could install it without the large puffs that come with Wendy's pattern.

Unfortunately the pattern is so busy, that it isn't actually evident that it has an empire line...and instead just looks like a one-piece tube dress. I also dislike how straight this dress is and would feel far more comfortable in it if the skirt section of it was more A-line in shape...it makes me feel strangely 1980s.

I am so annoyed that I have misued this lovely fabric so horribly that I'd be tempted to burn it if I wasn't slightly scared of setting things on fire.

And while I'm in an Eeyore sort of mood, lets talk about something else that I've noticed: an occupational hazard. I have become increasingly aware that I have two deep lines forming on my neck. I finally decided to get a second opinion on the lines from my lovely mother. When I started telling her about the problem she rushed to say that of course my neck wasn't partitioned by horizontal creases, but then stopped mid-sentence and said: gosh, yes, I see what you mean. She then asked me to put my head into 'looking-down-at-the-sewing-machine' position and was able to reveal that they are most likely to be the result of years of excessive sewing. (For the record, I then studied my mother's own neck for comparison...and I can report that even though she is more than 25 years older, her neck looked like some beautiful swan-like thing with not a wrinkle or crease in sight).

Naturally, I have taken steps to prevent further damage by holding my head perfectly straight, with my neck slightly raised at all times. My husband has told me I look like I'm wearing a neck brace after a particularly traumatic accident and my children giggle and ask me why I raise my neck up like a giraffe when I'm putting things in the kitchen bin...which has made me think that neck-crease reduction should be an activity undertaken alone, although ultimately, I think that it possibly requires too much effort to pursue in the long term. So this bad dress that I've made only adds insult to injury by piling on roughly 8 hours of unnecessary neck-creasing time to my life in the making of it.

I'm now off to my sewing machine to potentially cause more pointless damage...because the other occupational quirk that I've noticed is how one has unceasing optimism at the start of every new project, so for now, it feels like it might be neck-crease reinforcement that is worth risking....

Florence x

* The light in the first photo seems to erase the creases, just in case you scrolled back to check for evidence of them...perhaps I should conduct my life from the white light of the bathroom from now on.