It’s rare to get 4 days to sew right? We were at a retreat up the coast for an extended long weekend.

Here’s what I accomplished.

Day 1 was really 4 hours of sewing. McCalls patterns that I’ve used ‘for ever’ always get a look in when I’m prepping shirts, dresses and skirts that always have sway back adjustments.

McCalls 5433 has been used a bunch of times. This year I’ve been cutting out projects with remnants from my stash and pairing these projects with notions from my stash.

I’ve been keenly aware that I need to be mindful in my use of resources. In my sewing room I have quite a lot of really useful Prym products and they make projects like this shirt so much easier to refine.

By Day 2, I’ve used white buttons from my stash as the ‘real’ buttons. This means each button has a buttonhole sewn as the shirt closure. The brown buttons were a frocktails gift bag notion and this photo shows you how I’ll add these buttons to this shirt, when I get some ‘downtime’ to hand sew these buttons.

The other piece I was able to complete was a pair of knickers using Orange Lingerie Montgomery brief pattern. The first version worked (no photo here) and I’ll prep a few more and then blog about them.

Teresa Hardy created a list of Ukraine digital seller list and I bought 3 patterns from various sellers. The pattern above is a single pleat skirt that will be a sewalong this month by Salixsews and Septemberfarden on instagram.

Nicole and Helga picked the pattern of a Kyiv based designer Tatyana @factorem_imago_patterns. It is a lovely asymmetrical skirt. They will sew it together and offer a sewalong starting April 18. They created the hashtag #sewpportukraniandesigners and hope that many of you will join us. Everyone is welcome! Please tag Nicole @septemberfaden and Helga @salixsews and use the hashtag #sewpportukraniandesigners. It will help them find you and your posts.

By Day 3 I was able to finish this top using John Kaldor fabric I had originally made into McCalls 7745 as part of Minerva’s March McCalls promotion. I’ve now completed McCalls 6532 and I’ll take some pics for a future blog post.

Then I decided to make an aspirational dress. Series 2 of Bridgerton uses amazing lace overlays on dresses.

Locally I decided to support a bricks and mortar fabric store that has survived many lockdowns.

Lots of thread tracing, tailors tack and rechecking as I go meant this was a project I had to concentrate on. Once it’s done, I’ll blog about it.

By Day 4 I was able sew up the shell of this dress.

There’s more to do on this dress but for now, this is as far as I got.

End of Day 4 was late morning for me but I was able to make a start on McCalls 7390 again using remnants.

Back to real life again.