I drove up to my daughter's in Grayslake, IL, last Thursday in preparation for my grandson's First Communion event. Meg had changed some things. The "English basement" room is now fitted as a sewing/guest room. I ooohed and aaaahed over it. I always wanted a sewing room!
The kids live in a townhouse. The garage and the English basement are on the ground floor. Things go up from there. The basement room is where I stay when I am there. The windows in the room are literally at ground level. The cat loves to look out at the ground squirrels that come right up to the window, so Megan leaves the blinds pulled up a bit so Toffee-Cat can do her cat thing. Unfortunately, having the blinds up also makes everything visible to anyone passing by.
Sometime after I got there but before dinner, we were wrapped up in a project that Meg was doing for Ryan's First Communion when there was a knock on the window. Huh? A male neighbor across the sidewalk saw the sewing machine in use and said his daughter needed to have a prom dress hemmed. Could we do it? Megan isn't into sewing clothing, but she told him we'd look at it, knowing that if we took it on, it would be my call. A bit later, the neighbor's wife and daughter and one of the daughter's girlfriends showed up at the door with the dress. The dress was too long. In order to make do, the gal had bought two pairs of shoes--one of which was high platforms. She could never have danced in those!! They had taken the dress to a cleaners who quoted them $130 for hemming because the skirt had three layers.
Understand that we didn't know them and they didn't know us. This was Thursday late afternoon. The Prom was Friday. They would never be able to find anyone to do the job in the time that was left. (Megan wondered what their plan was. I wondered, too!) After about 30 minutes of seeing the dress tried on with the young lady standing on a stool, etc., I said something like, "I have to be out of my mind, but I'll give it a go." The mother made a run to a fabric store to buy matching thread, and the task was on.
The skirt was very full and in three layers. The two under-layers were satin and shorter/less full than the outer layer, which was chiffon. Unless you are a seamstress, you might not understand that something that is circular, like the skirts of that dress, cannot be hemmed normally without major puckers. The hem has to be tiny. Like a quarter-inch. Tricky.
Since I was already somewhat tired, I thought about tackling the project on Friday morning, but something told me that I needed to start after supper on Thursday. I'm glad I did! The chiffon layer was so full that it took all evening just to measure and cut the right length, and run a basting stitch to hold everything in place before I used the sewing machine. I was already trying to think about how to shorten the process for the next two layers.
Truly, if I'd had a week to work on the dress, I could have done a semi-professional job on it. With less than 24 hours, however, I was less than pleased with how it came out. With that in mind, when the folks came to pick up the dress on Friday afternoon, the mother asked me how much money I wanted for my work. I asked for $20. She gave me $50! Two days after the Prom, they came over with a thank-you note for me and three pieces of cake for us all, saying that I had saved them from a crisis. The Prom-goer told me that the dress was a perfect length for dancing barefoot, which is what she told me she intended to do from the beginning. Honestly, I was somewhat ashamed with the quality of my work, but they seemed to be okay with having the dress shorter no matter how bad it looked at close inspection.
In any case, Meg and Denis have now met new neighbors. It's all good!
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