i'm still alive and kicking.....

Well after a week of solid lounge surfing, I almost feel normal again. It's funny how a simple cold really knocked me around last week, but I guess when you're pregnant every ache and pain is amplified and having a pesky cough further stretches my already stretched stomach muscles.

Anyway I finally finished sewing up my latest dress in my summer SWAP. Which is good timing because have you seen that the delightfully funny Livebird has announced December as Dressember? She has been coming up with some gorgeous dresses over at Sew Retro, including this collared full circle skirt dress and this graphic print dress, so now I feel the need to keep up with her mammoth efforts. Although, I'll be on maternity leave in December and will most likely spent most days wallowing in my pj's, but I do vow here on this blog to wear a dress whenever I do go out, and wearing a granny nightie whilst in labour still counts as a sort of dress, right?

So back to the latest dress, I actually finished it about two weeks ago but wasn't overly happy with how it turned out so I had to do some adjustments. I used dress pattern 117 from the BWOF 5/08 magazine, and made a simple modification by adding extra width to the front piece to cater for my now ginormous belly (which you can see in red line below, how high tech am I?)

This is such a simple dress, having two pattern pieces and three lengths of ribbon but on my first sewing up of this dress I didn't gather enough of the extra width below the centre front ribbon so it was very shapeless, and I also found it to be waaaaay too low cut, which is typical for BWOF styles. So I had to take the ribbon off (it was just topstitched on anyway), gather it a bit more and sew the ribbon on, which now gives it a much nicer shape. And because I wanted this dress to be nursing friendly, I actually used buttons to join the ribbon straps to the front instead of sewing them down, so it was a simple matter of moving the buttons to hoik the dress up a bit in the front. And here's the final product:

It's made from a cotton voile purple leaf print (not stalks of corn as I'm sure it looks) on grey background with little green lines through it, bought some time ago from Spotlight (at least 2 years ago?). The ribbon straps are made from some navy blue grosgrain ribbon that came from a Crabtree and Evelyn gift basket that my husband once gave to me (note to husband who sometimes reads this: another one of those gift baskets wouldn't go unthanked!). Funnily enough a navy blue ribbon was just right for the colours of the dress:

In other good news, our lazy builders finally poured the concrete slabs for the house extension, and even started the framework. They still claim it will be done by Christmas, but I won't believe it until I see it, because they are certainly the little boy that cried wolf! So now our disaster zone still looks like a disaster zone, but there is progress:

And in even better news, I only have 9 days left of work before I start maternity leave. I actually have two weeks to go, but being a true public servant I am taking a flex day next Tuesday LOL.

Vireya - I got my tax return early last week which is impressive for the ATO at this time of the year, although I only got $180 back so perhaps Vicki I should see a professional like yourself! My tax is so simple (one source of income only) that I've always just done it myself, whereas my husband has such complicated tax affairs he sends off a whole box of papers and scored a pretty good refund. But next year our tax affairs will be merged because of the family tax benefits and the like, so I guess my days of lax accounting are over.....

I've just noticed that the photo of the dress above makes me look a lot smaller than I am (which is good), but here is a belly shot taken today with my scruffy husband who is trying to grow a mo for Movember:

Check out that belly! If my husband wasn't pointing in a helpful manner you would never have guessed, right? And you can see why I think this baby is going to be huge - my husband is a giant and I was a 9 pound something baby!