Violetta Craft's Arc

Chapter 9 of 65

The fabric arrived on Tuesday in three flat bundles. Violetta laid them out on the cutting table in her sewing room and pressed her palm to each one. Buttercream. Soft rose. A narrow bolt of green. She had ordered exact yardage for a dress with no room to waste. The design called for a bodice that blended all three colors into a single seamless panel, a technique she had read about but never tried. If she cut wrong, there was no time to reorder before the showcase. Jordie sat on the floor with the puppy and watched her measure the same panel four times. He asked if she wanted him to leave. She said no. She wanted him where she could see him. She pinned the paper pattern to the buttercream first, then the rose, then the green, and stared at the three shapes without picking up her shears. Her hands would not move. She set the shears down and drove to her parents' house. Lymber was at the kitchen table with a laptop open for work. Paul was washing dishes. Missy sat on the floor with a coloring book. Violetta explained the panel. Three colors, one seam, no test run. Lymber closed the laptop. She said to bring the scraps from the muslin. She said they would practice the blend on paper first, then on the leftover cotton, before any real fabric touched the shears. Paul dried his hands and pulled a chair out for her. They worked at the table for three hours. Lymber sketched the gradient in colored pencil while Violetta cut narrow strips of muslin and pinned them edge to edge. The first try puckered. The second lay flat but the color shift looked striped. On the third try Violetta angled the seams and let the green trail into the rose in a thin diagonal. Missy looked up from her book and said it looked like a sunset. Violetta took a photo of the strip and taped it to the folder. She drove back to the bright little house she rented with Jordie and laid the three real bolts out again. This time her hands moved. She cut the buttercream first because it was the largest piece and the least forgiving. Then the rose. Then the green, one careful pass at a time. She sewed the panel together after midnight, pressed the seams open, and held it up to the lamp. The colors blended in a soft diagonal, the way they had on the muslin. No puckering. No stripes. One panel, clean. She pinned the finished panel to the dress form and stepped back. Jordie stood in the doorway with the puppy under one arm. He said it looked like her sketch. She said it looked better. Three weeks of fabric left to cut, a skirt to draft, a hem to finish. She turned off the overhead light and left the small lamp on above the form so she would see it first thing in the morning.