This week’s poll is about your sewing bête noir – the thing that you just hate doing. I know a lot of seamstresses of various skill levels who hate doing zips, buttons, or sleeves, but those don’t fuss me.  What I really loathe, stuff-up all the time, and try to avoid, is gathering. I did not enjoy making the skirt of this dress! I know!  It seems so simple!  But my gathering lines are always breaking, and going wonky, and when I sew the gathered pieces together somehow I always get a big pleat caught up in the gathering.  It’s horrible and evil I tell you, evil. That’s why I love corded gathering so much.  I was so, so excited when I discovered it.  It’s so much easier! And my desire to avoid gathering is also why I am willing to pleat metres and metres of silk organza into tiny pin pleats by hand.  Anything is good as long as it means I don’t have to machine gather! My very first garment that I learned …

Last week’s poll was really interesting and enlightening for me. The poll question was “What is your favourite Dreamstress dress?” It’s not a question I would ever have dared ask on my own, but Elise suggested it when I asked for poll ideas (thanks Elise!) and I thought it was a great suggestion. The most interesting thing that I learned from the poll is that there isn’t a clear favourite: the votes were widely distributed across all the garments. The most popular was the Juno Victorian Goddess dress, with 16% of you choosing it as your favourite.  I’m not surprised: it’s a gorgeous dress, it looks amazing on the models who have worn it, and there are photos that show it off well. It’s not actually among my favourite dresses, mostly because I didn’t make it for me, and it doesn’t fit me, so I’m a little detached from it. The runner up was Ninon’s dress, with 12.5% of the votes.  That is one of my favourites! It was closely followed by the 1880s Japonisme …