The six-gore black wool blend skirt (Burda 8973, lengthened, minus lining) is three-quarters assembled. I love the serger--without it, I'd have been sewing seven seams and finishing fourteen raw edges. With it, I used the five-thread safety stitch, knife (gulp) on, and shot through seven seams in less than an hour. Foom!
Well, OK, there was the entire gore that I left out. When I tried the skirt on I thought that I'd re-gained some of the weight I'd lost last year, and put the partially completed skirt away for when I lost it again. Then I sat down to watch TV and wondered what that scrap of black fabric was...oh. So, I had to cut out a seam and add it; luckily the skirt was then loose enough to support the lost seam allowance. (I didn't regain the weight! Yay!) Then I did a dubious job of applying the zipper, but in matte black I think that the flaws will be invisible. Mostly. I wear my shirts untucked anyway. Now it's waiting for a waistband and a hem.
For the hem, I'm going to try a coverstitch, which worked beautifully on the same skirt in black linen. A lighter-weight black linen version of the Princess Frankendress is also waiting for a coverstitched hem. But re-threading the machine for another function requires thinking. So I'm going to stitch up the already-cut grass-green Liberty Shirt (re-threading for another color requires less thought) and anything else that's ready to go, before I do that.
I'll be curious to see how the Princess Frankendress works when worn, though it has construction flaws--the waist ended up being a good deal looser than I intended, and I committed an error in the front placket that makes it lie a little funny. In any case, this isn't The Dress, the tried-and-true make-a-dozen-times dress pattern that I've been working toward. It's a little too much like the dresses that I used to wear in high school. I want something else.
The something else might be Burda 7446, a fitted (princess front; darted back) dress with raglan sleeves and inverted pleats in the back of the skirt and a slightly turtley neck. The turtleneckness won't work for summer, but otherwise I like all of those things. It has shoulder pads, which I don't like at all; I'll need to read up on how to alter the pattern to eliminate them. Assuming that I can. I recently bought a fitted raglan sleeve jacket in a fuzzy slightly stretch wool, and I'd be happy if I can get this dress to fit the same way.
I also made a Mixit Tank; Himself hates it with a fiery passion, but it was a nice experiment in applying bias binding, and I could technically sub it in for one of the SWAP garments. That's very roughly ten percent of the SWAP in very roughly ten percent of the total time. (two weeks out of seventeen.) Yay!
