Step 1 technically complete

 I finally went back to the bodice pieces on my fancy housecoat, and technically have completed step 1 of this pattern now.

I completed all the seams (felled everything down) and finally got the shoulders together. Which puts this piece at my favorite place: technically wearable! I continue to absolutely love this fabric, the pattern is so great every time I look at it.

I've also continued working on the trim for the capelet piece:

There's something so delightful about a pile of trim. The pattern originally requested a zipper as the trim here and cleverly used the zipper tape to enclose the raw edges of the capelet. I'm mimicking that tape with a few rows of half-double crochet. We'll see how it works!

Back from class

 No post last week because I was gathering all my scattered stitching tools so I could go to class this past weekend. I took two classes from Jackie Du Plessis:

Richelieu Royale and a new project, the Puzzle Box. Both were one day classes that were pretty freaking intense. Not much stitching, both classes were primarily focused on construction. I won't be working on these at home quite yet: I'm still really focused on my bathrobe project, and I have to finish Madam Butterfly. Then I think I want to finish the flame stitch huswif project, which was the previous class from Jackie I took. But by then, my mom will hopefully have finished moving (closer to me!) and we can get together to work on these. Both have a lot of pieces to put together, so this may be easier to work on at her place, since she will not have 3 cats underfoot who would love to help with all those small pieces.

Catch up post

 I took the pictures, but forgot to actually post them last week. So here's where I was a week ago:

That is half of the top, because my table is not long enough to stretch out the whole thing and take a picture. But all the side seams are done, and I'm waiting for a later step to get the shoulders together. I did cut everything as though the fabric had a nap, but didn't try to pattern match. But I think it worked out really well! The diagonal flow of the flowers matches, and they change enough that the transition between seams didn't stand out too badly. Serendipity!

Did I mention this design has a little cape thing? Because it has a cape thing! Got the shoulder seams done last week; felled down the raw edges on those seams this week. Now this thing gets a couple types of trim, which has been mostly what I worked on this week:

Dusty keyboard kept in the pic for scale. This is half of a tatted trim that will go along the shoulders. I'm kind of going for an epaulette-type look? The blue thread is a pretty close match to the blue fleece, so it should be mostly the texture and the beads. So basically I have to do this band a total of 4 times. By hand. For a bathrobe.