The alteration that pushed me to retire, TDF wrap up, and the t-shirt quilt

Yes, I am retiring from doing any more alterations. Fixing this dress was a huge pain. Here the dress is on the lady before. You can see how she is grabbing a handful of the dress. You can just barely see on the shoulder of arm holding the phone how the neckline buckles a bit.

I worked on this dress on Saturday. I ended up taking four inches out of the dress at the back zipper and all the way down the back. In order to put the zipper back in I had to do a lot of hand basting. The underlining and the sheer gray top fabric was all silk and slippery.

I had to do a lot of hand stitching on this dress. The lining at the zipper, all the beaded sections that had been loosened, and I even made a loop for the hook out of thread just like the original. Here it is done after 6 1/2 hours!

I was exhausted, but the lady was happy. This dress broke my spirit of ever wanting to do another alteration again. I needed to be working on my t-shirt quilt!

The rest of my weekend was spent walking and working on the t-shirt quilt. I only have a couple of weeks to get this done. I now have 3/4 of the shirts with some time of embroidery added. I just added some quilting to the Pink Floyd shirt

For Lynard Skynard I did a blanket stitch around the edges and some quilting around the design

Added a border for the Stones shirt

Guns and Roses got kind of an open chain stitch for the border and I added some quilting stitches around the nose and eyes of the skull.

I watched the final stage of the TDF on Sunday. The boys were on the last lap on the Champs de Elysee and the satellite when out. Yes, you read this correctly. After three weeks of following the race the satellite went out due to a insignificant bit of rain. Can you even imagine how mad I was? I called DISH and told them exactly how I felt. I also had said I would submit to a survey and when that came in over my phone I told them again how I would never recommend DISH to anyone. I am also going to write them an email today. So I didn't get to see the sprint finish.

The satellite did come back on for the awards ceremony although they kept cutting in with a bunch of stupid NASCAR stuff as the TDF ran over the allotted time.

Peter won the green jersey. You should have seen the green flower arrangement they gave him. It was gorgeous! In fact all the flowers given throughout the race to the winners were fabulous!

Nairo Quintana won the best young rider under 25. Can you believe how little this guy is? Look at the podium girls in comparison to him. He is from Columbia.

Chris Froome won the King of the mountains jersey and the yellow jersey. They didn't show him getting the mountain jersey.

There were other awards handed out that did not get broadcasted or Chris Froome's speech since the network was in a hurry to show a NASCAR race.