A Frock by THIS Friday?

I've been working on the Frock by Friday sew along that's going on over at Grosgrain Fabulous, but I'm just a wee bit behind after what I thought was a really promising start. Monday's assignment was to tape together the patterns (it's a mashup of a the Alexander blouse from Burdastyle and a free McCalls pattern, click on the link to Grosgrain above and you can see what they are). Oh, and you were supposed to cut everything out. So, I managed to cut out the skirt part, and realized that I didn't really have enough fabric for the pockets (which were the kind that you had to have matching fabric). My solution:

But the Burda blouse didn't actually get cut out. Moving on though, yesterday it seemed I lucked out and the assignment was to sew up the skirt. Well, I managed to get the pleats put in, and the pockets attached. I felt myself falling behind. This sewing along to get a frock done in a week seems fraught with disaster. My pictures aren't that good, but look anyway. A picture of how the pocket looks:

The fabric is a cheapy suiting dark gray thing that I bought a couple of years ago at the Fabric.com warehouse sale. You know, where you bought fabric by the pound. It was awesome in its own way, but I digress.

That brings us to today. I did a pin fitting, and whoops, it was too big. FOUR inches too big. I don't really know how that happened, but I measured the pattern and my body, and cut the fabric accordingly. Well, never mind because too big is easier to fix than too small. With the pockets, I couldn't just make huge side seams, so I added four more pleats, so now there are three pleats on each side, front and back. That worked pretty well, and I did 5/8" side seams down past the pockets, and then widened the side seam allowance all the way to 1".

It looks kind of poofy, and I'm toying with the idea of sewing the middle pleats down all the way to the hem all around. It's something I can do at any stage though, so I think I'll wait. Ignore the white top.

For the top, I was going to use some silver silk charmeuse that Laura had picked out for a sash for her wedding dress, and then she got a different dress, and that meant no sash. (Wedding dress drama) I'm kind of glad that I didn't cut it out though, because I think I'm going with some gray cotton that was going to be a flower girl dress before we decided to go with lavender. The top looks more complicated. Not hard, but just more involved.

No post on Grosgrain today about an assignment, but besides cutting out the top, I need to buy a zipper, maybe buttons, do laundry, and we're having out of town company on Friday. Well, you get the picture.

In other sew along news, I received my Lady Grey coat pattern in the mail today! Woo hoo! Does a black wool flannel coat sound too boring? I think I'm going with black with a snazzy lining.