On Saturday, Hitty Dauphine went out to pick up the mail and found that she had received a package from Gail Wilson Designs, who makes all kinds of lovely Hitty accessories and kits.
"That's funny," Her person said, "I don't remember ordering anything from Gail Wilson. I hope they didn't just charge my card." And I have to say, I think her heart beat just a tiny bit faster because she'd spent all of her extra money this week on new tires for her car.
But when Dauphine opened the package, she found this card attached to the front.
It reads, just in case your screen is as tiny as mine, "From a 'Secret Benefactor' whose identity we are not allowed to divulge. Enjoy!"
Well, we were thrilled to receive such a lovely token of someone's esteem and greeted the package with squeals of pleasure and much hearty giggling (and if any of you know me, you know that to be true...I giggle about everything).
Inside, we found a kit for one of Gail Wilson's dresses, the Jane Austen Dress, to be exact...
...which was appropo since we'd been talking about not only Gail Wilson's Hitty dress kits, but also the 200th anniversary of the publishing of Jane Austen's Pride and Predjudice on Hittygirls just last week and I had mentioned just how much I had been longing for Gail's Jane Austen dress.
As quick as a wink, Hitty Dauphine had torn open the kit and started examining the directions.
She read through them THREE times just to be sure she understood how to construct the dress properly (it is very important to read directions THREE times).
As soon as she had a handle on the pattern, she started choosing fabrics for her new dress.
Once the fabric had been chosen, she transferred the pattern to the fabric very carefully.
And then she cut out the pattern pieces using the good sewing scissors.
And after many long hours of careful stitching (set-in sleeves are quite fiddly, you know)...
...she had a brand new, Jane Austen style dress...
with delicate lace trim at the hem of her 3/4 length sleeve...
...and tiny tucks around the skirt.
For those of you familiar with Gail Wilson's kits, you will see that this dress was not constructed from the original fabrics. Included in the kit is a very delicate piece of white cotton batiste. Since we intend to make a few more of these dresses for our sisters, we decided to use some Liberty of London fabric we had in our stash. It is also very delicate but will afford each of the Weathertop Hittys to have a dress of her very own.
We would like to pause now to thank our sponsor, whoever you may be. We greatly appreciated the gift you sent us and will enjoy making several more Jane Austen style dresses. We hope that you, especially, enjoyed this episode of the Adventures at Weathertop.
