The dress is not yet finished, but I have five hours, so you know, I’m not concerned. (The phrase “not concerned” is here used to mean that I am panicked beyond all reason.)

While I am sworn not to reveal the exact nature of the dress until the child dons it this evening, I can tell you that it includes the following.

1. Eight metres of tulle. If you don’t know about tulle, it’s that sheer stuff in the top of the picture. They use if for bridal veils. We are using Eight metres (that’s 26 feet, for anybody not making the metric leap) of 140cm wide black tulle. The living room looks like a satanic wedding party played strip poker in there.

2. A bodice which (while it has no inset) has boning. I was ripping along yesterday minding my own business, (you know, just me and the voluminous black cloud of tulle.) and I was sewing the bodice together and got to this instruction about inserting the boning in the boning casing and the bottom just dropped out of the world. Boning? What the hell is boning?

3. A trip to Fabricland where I was a assured by several members of the staff (who were not very openminded, let me tell you) that the purpose of boning is to stiffen the bodice and that they don’t believe that there is any amount of fusible interfacing that you can iron into a bodice to get out of putting in boning. (Though they did seem amused by my multilayer fabric stiffening plan.)

It turns out they are right.

4. A very long zipper. I hate putting in zippers. Hate. It. I actually sort of hate sewing in general…which makes me wonder why the hell I’m sitting here surrounded by clouds of tulle, bewildering instructions (There is no armhole. How can I sew facing to it? Liars. Manipulative stinking liars.), scattered snips of turquoise fabric, elastic, boning and a very perplexed cat.

Also hanging around are my chinese scissors, which so many of you asked about yesterday. I got them at Lee Valley Tools, from whence so many very, very cool things come.

(Like this, or this, or this…or wait, we bought my brother this.)

The boring baby blanket is at the halfway mark, from here it’s just a game of stamina.

I’ve taken all current socks in progress out of my backpack and put the blanket in, thus giving me absolutely no choice but to knit it. I hate it when it comes down to dirty tricks. (Know any?)

It’s going to be a long second half.