My husband and I are getting ready to head out to Fandango, an English Country Dance event held in Atlanta, Georgia. We attended in 2019, but the pandemic canceled the next two years. Getting to go again is rather exciting.

So, my mind is fixed on all things dancing: finishing a new ball gown, practicing my steps, learning new dances, checking to see who will be attending, wondering what new people we will meet. How convenient, given that I am writing about planning and attending a ball-type event in the latest book.

Sometimes it is eerie how real-life and fiction tend to overlap for me. In the book, the dress is presenting all manner of challenges. Guess what, so is mine!

I started this gown in 2020, in preparation for out local big event, which of course was cancelled. I packed everything up, leaving pretty detailed notes of what I was planning and what had already been done. The notes were necessary because, as usual, I was diverting from the pattern, using three different fabrics in ways not originally intended, and just to make things more complex, I was designing two dresses as once.

I bought the ends of several bolts of fabric some years ago. In practical terms it meant I had too much of one fabric and to little of the other. They are coordinating fabrics though, so one dress will be the two fabrics combined. Natually that meant that I had to rejigger the layout of the pieces on the fabric and make sure I kept track of which piece got cut out of which main fabric, or any of the three other accent fabrics in the stack. I very nearly created a spreadsheet … but that’s another story.

Cutting done, I had to bead the sleeves, which seemed like a great idea on paper. Two hundred, individually, hand sewn beads later, not so much. But I survived without too much bloodshed or foul language, and some beads left over (remember these, they will be important later) so that was a win.

Then came the usual trials and tribulations of sewing slippery fabrics (satin) to other slippery fabric (organza), but that sort of thing is expected, so not too much of a problem.  However, leaving things at that would have been too easy, so Rhapso (minor goddess of sewing) or Arachne, (whichever member of the pantheon appropriate to blame here) stepped in with some new and novel tricks to throw at me.

First, there was the zipper. The dress was not designed for a zipper. But due to supply chain vagaries, that became the only option to close the dress that would hold up to the rigors of dance. So, I had to put in my first invisible zipper into a dress already far past the stage where said zipper should have been applied. Yes, there was bloodshed—pins and sharp and pointy—who knew? And more than one creative expression was deployed in the process. But the zipper was indeed deployed. It’s an ugly zipper, but it works and we will avoid wardrobe failures on the dance floor.

The second challenge involved gravity, two-way stretch lace, and a, overskirt that grew three inches longer after it was sewn than when it was cut. Cutting the lace, hemming the lace, and picking it apart and starting over were all impossible options for one reason or another. It took some creativity, and every one of the leftover beads from the sleeves to create a scalloping hemline that hopefully looks intentional. I am now completely out of beads—but shhhh, don’t say that too loudly or something else will go sideways!

And before you ask what happened with my character’s dress, the answer is I don’t know yet. I thought I knew, but the dragons keep running away with the plot, so I don’t really know what’s going to happen.

Maybe that’s a good thing…