A tidy place to work

Ian thinks that either aliens came in to the house today and removed all the clutter around my upstairs work area, or magic cleaning creatures came in and magically cleaned everything up. That's because I don't like to clean,m and yet my upstairs work area was all clean when he got home.

Yes, it was me who cleaned it and tidied it up. :) I spent this afternoon tidying up the area. Most of my time was occupied with getting rid of all the old magazines and phone books as well as sorting through and tidying up all of the beads and various pieces of paper. Now that it's so much neater over there, it'll be a lot easier to work. You see, there's a Christmas party coming up and I've been wanting to work on some vintage patterns, but I didn't have space to do that. Now I've got the space and tidiness I need.

So now all I need is a pattern :) Of course I'd love the pattern to be vintage or vintage-style! The biggest criteria is that the design be slimming on me. I'm at my highest weight ever and it's unlikely that I'll be substantially smaller before the party, so anything that can fool the eye into making me look skinnier is a good thing. I may also buy a body slimmer or corset to help bring my measurements down. I know that they're not all that comfortable, but if I look better in them, I'm willing to go that route.

I expect that the dress silhouette will be a fairly simple sheath or slight a-line style because those don't add bulk the way fuller skirts do. If possible, I might try to incorporate some diagonal ruching or light pleating across the tummy to make it look slimmer. And if I can emphasize certain lines with seams or trims, I'll do that, too. There's no way that I'll be able to completely disguise my size, of course, so my goal will be to make me look the best I can at my current size. That's all any of us can reasonably expect.