Grumble grumble.

Our household has been overrun with colds and flu this past week, we have now all three of us succumbed. I haven't left the house in about five days, but am feeling slightly better today. The most annoying part is that I was meant to have surgery on my knee this Tuesday (remember I dislocated my kneecap? Well an MRI showed "multiple loose bodies" floating around in there which had broken off and need to come out - the physio wasn't working and my knee kept 'locking' in certain positions which was excruciating). But now I can't have the stupid surgery because I am too sickly to have a general anesthetic. Grrr, grumble grumble.

Anyway, a couple of weeks back I sat down to start making my new dress with my pattern from Japan. Turns out they put all the patterns for all the dresses in the book (there's about 20) onto two pieces of paper - all overlapped and doublesided so you can't actually cut out pattern pieces, you have to trace them.


And then there are the instructions - I figured it would just be like a jigsaw where you just put the pieces together in a logical order, but I can't actually read the important bits like which side of the sleeve is the front and which is the back. It's all in kanji and hiragana.


Fortunately there are some pretty nifty online translation tools which I made use of and I think I have it sorted. I made a rough start on one of the dresses using old pieces of cotton to work out my size - as I suspected I am a giant in Japanese proportions - the largest size!

I will try and start the real thing this week. While I grumble about not having my knee fixed. Grrr, grumble grumble grumble. Cough cough cough.