TL; DR – Sometimes you just need to sew something relatively simple in gorgeous prints so that you can use sewing as therapy and finally control something ANYTHING in your life.

Excuse the language, but shit’s been shitty around here lately. I hadn’t been sewing, I hadn’t been writing, I was barely making it through the day. So I took last week off and sewed my ass off.

These were the two last dresses I made, but the first I’m writing about because I’ve already reviewed the pattern so I can talk about…well, whatever I want.

I sewed these two wrap dresses in rapid succession, even returning to finish the blue one after dinner (which usually I’m too worn out by the time dinner rolls around to successfully, or at least less-stressfully, any sewing I’d started). On the large blue floral one, the fabric you may recognize from this dress, I added a little bit of flair at the bottom to give it some movement and volume, and I’m quite happy with it.

The other one is made from wax print, and you should immediately go and listen to this episode of the Stitch Please podcast to learn about how problematic this fabric is, but I got it from a destash group and before I had listened to the podcast episode, and look at that turquoise! And the purple roses! And don’t the colors look AMAZING on me?

I love this pattern because it’s almost entirely just straight lines. The one exception is the neck in the back (and the arm holes and pockets), but it’s easy to cut, easy to assemble, easy to sew. There is literally nothing hard about this dress. At all. And when you’re done, it’s reliably adorable! Look at my smile! I really mean it and I’m not just plastering it on my face as a mask! I look like a cute, normal human female!

These two dresses were a small win for me, but a win (ok, two wins?) I sorely needed. I don’t know if I was practicing mindful sewing or mindless sewing; everything, even the sewing really, just fell away. I could reliably be on autopilot, zone out while I was sewing. The hardest step (for me) is the first one, because I have to make sure I get the direction of the facing right, but once I get that set up, my mind can go rather blank and it’s ok.

Sew the front facings to the neck facing. Zigzag the outside edge. Sew the pockets to the sides at the lower two notches. Anchor them open with a zigzag to knock out two steps in one. Sew the shoulders, sew the sides, zigzag the shoulders, zigzag the sides. Anchor the pocket (but you can come back and do that if you forget. Sew the facing, anchor the facing. Sew the tie, turn out the tie, sew the tie to the dress. Sew the sleeve hem. Sew the bottom hem.

I don’t have to keep looking at the instructions, I can just sew, can just be. I don’t even think what I’m doing is getting into “the flow” – I’m not being creative. At all. I’m mechanically following a series of relatively simple steps that I know how to do relatively well. And that’s ok! That’s all my brain and my body wanted to do, all it could do. So we did that. And we got two cute dresses from it.

And for a day, I wasn’t constantly thinking about how shitty everything is right now.