Haven’t posted in a while … there’s a backlog of new dresses and old patterns with new stories, but a shortage of TIME to post them in!

This picture, of course, takes priority, as it involves a kilt — that’s my handsome-yet-goofy younger brother in the McKean tartan with all the trimmings, ready to walk my little sister down the aisle at her lovely wedding in Brooklyn last weekend. (Don’t ask me which variant of the McKean/McIan tartan this is, it could also be some kind of McDonald? Genealogy is complimacated.)

She asked me to stand up for her as well (that’s why I’m holding a sheaf of lavender, that’s not a customary accessory of mine) and asked me to wear navy blue.  (Of course I did not own a navy blue dress of any kind whatsoever.)

After a few false starts, I finally just made THE SAME OLD DRESS I’VE BEEN MAKING FOR THE LAST FOUR MONTHS. Here’s a post where you can see the lines of the dress. It’s the Simplicity 2389 bodice with the (heavily modified) Burdastyle Heidi skirt. And now I have a navy dress.

I don’t own navy shoes, because navy shoes never match anything else that’s navy, so the silver ankle-straps were left over from that part of the early 2000s where I was going to a lot of weddings. I forgot how painful they were — note my “let me just relieve the pressure on this foot here” stance — so they were exchanged for flats at the earliest possible point of the proceedings.

At the shoulder you can kind of maybe partly see that I did do piping for this one as well — self-bias piping with nice fat cord. The fabric is a kind of faille so the corded piping has a nice bias twist to it, very satisfying (if nearly invisible).

It was a very happy day. Hope your days have been happy, too.