The Shir-minator

With less than two weeks to go til my big fair, I've switched over to assembly line making. As the term would imply, this means that I'm giving myself a couple of days to work exclusively on one design before moving on to the design. Anything that's not completed by the time allocated is relegated to my (ever growing) Work In Progress pile. Because I have lots I still want to do, this prevents me from becoming obsessed with any one thing and ensures my range will be more well-rounded. It is effective from an efficiency point of view, but oh-so-boring and more than a little soul destroying.

So... 256. That was me this weekend. But what does 256 signify?

• a) Daily calories allowed in the sweatshop
• b) Minutes sleep allowed in the sweatshop
• c) Number of times Jamie got out of bed
• d) Milligrams of lithium I am taking to get me through the assembly line making
• e) Number of feet of double fold binding I cut, ironed and sewed for straps

And the answer? On Thursday I cut out 35 sundresses for shirring. 35 sundresses have 140 straps. Each strap is 22 inches long. So 256 feet of double fold straps cut, ironed under one side, ironed under other side, folded in half and ironed, sewn closed. About halfway through I found my bias tape maker contraption and that helped me along a bit quicker. For any other masochists out there making vast quantities of straps, get yourself one of these thingeys.

Gosh, what would all those straps look like?! Like this:

Unfortunately, despite making all of the straps for all 35 dresses, I only managed to get 29 dresses done before losing the will to live moving on to the next project. Maybe I'll get a chance to finish them off before the fair but it's handy to have nearly-completed things to wizz through in the evenings during the fair should I need to replenish stock.

Here's my stack of dresses:

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