I made that thing. I still made it. The story of it is longer now than I planned, and less simple, and the cuff carries something mine and something added and the difference between those two is visible if you know to look.
I think I’ll always know to look. I think that is okay.
## The Nine Months in Detail
I want to walk through the construction more specifically, because I think the abstraction ‘nine months of work’ does not communicate what nine months of work actually means, and the abstraction is part of what made it easy for my mother to minimize.
January: I finalized the pattern. I had been making changes to the base block since November — adjusting the shoulder pitch, regrading the waist-to-hip ratio, figuring out exactly where the seam below the knee needed to fall to produce the flare I wanted without turning into something fussy. When I work on construction packages at my job, I think in fractions of inches. A quarter inch in shoulder pitch changes how a garment sits. An eighth of an inch at the hem seam allowance affects whether the hem will roll. I applied that same attention to my own dress, because I could, and because I wanted to.
February: I cut the first muslin. Cotton broadcloth in a similar weight to the silk crepe, not the same but close enough to assess the silhouette. The first muslin showed me three things: the side seam placement was slightly too far back, the armhole needed another quarter inch, and the skirt was rolling into the body above the knee in a way that would not disappear in the silk. These are not dramatic failures. These are the things you see in a muslin so you don’t see them in the real fabric.