Stage One complete

I stayed up watching Rush Hour just to finish the hemline off last night...:

(not quite how I expected it to look, but I'm hoping it won't crease so much when the embroidery is added!)

...then this morning, in bed with a croissant and coffee, I finished off the sleeves...:


...and early this afternoon, in front of Time Team, I finished sewing up the sleeves:


Technically, that's Stage One complete; the shell of the dress has been finished. Lots of work to go though!

• I'm going to need to work the edges of the neck, hem and sleeve lines. For this, I am going to attempt crochet... Which could go badly. I've been watching the How To videos online about single crochet edging, and none of them move slowly enough to show you what the hell they're really doing!! Still, it's all a learning curve...
  
  
• I have to decide whether to knit a chest band, to match the effect on the original dress I've based the whole idea on. I'm impressed that I still have quite a lot of wool left - I had worried 500g wouldn't be enough for a dress, but I think, because it's such thin wool, it goes far further. I could also stitch in some front panel effects, either using what I hope will be my extraordinary crocheting skills after the above work, or just returning to my basic sewing abilities...
  
  
• Then it's on to Stage Two, which means collecting lots of coloured wools together for the embroidery part. The other day I found an old t-shirt with an embroidered bib on it, and was interested to see they'd actually used chunks of coloured material which they then over-sewed, very roughly, with coloured thread. That did look quite good, and I haven't totally ruled the idea out as a possibility now, since I have a lot of material scraps already. But I'd like to see what wool I can get hold of first and stick to Plan A. Until it starts to go wrong.
  I'm going to need:
  - medium green
  - light blue
  - blue marl
  - brown marl
  - dark pink
  - white, and
  - black.
  Not too much then! I have a bit of white and pale blue, as well as a darker than envisioned brown, from my Nanna's knitting machine collection, and I could potentially substitute some colours - use the leftover dark red from the 'bloody cardigan', for example, instead of dark pink, and I have some mottled, dark sea-blue wool that might work. Tomorrow, I may hunt in the local craft shop through some of their toy-wool collections - they usually sell 10g or 25g balls for about 45p. But if they don't have what I'm looking for, then I'll drag my dad into the Pound Shop next weekend; I may not need to spend £7 on 100g balls, but if I do, at least I'll then have scrap wool left over for other things. And I still won't have reached the price of the original dress!
  
  
• Finally, Stage Three will involve lining the dress. The embroidery will at least help to cover up any knitting slips to the main dress, but the wool will still be too thin to wear by itself. Luckily I have an old grey dress I've been trying unsuccessfully to sell on Ebay for months, so it looks like a cut-up-and-recycle job for that...

I probably ought to get on with my neglected housework first though... :(