Some achievement

Just not the type I really should have focused on.

I finished the big stuff on Rose’s dress, but as you can see, the shoulders are so wide that they fall off on one side.  I’ll have to tweak it somehow – maybe a dart in the centre of the back? – so that the neckline comes in a bit.  It still needs boning down the front, which is why it’s a bit crinkled.  It also needs hemming, which I can’t do until she has the pocket hoops to wear underneath.  And it could probably be pulled in a little more, so it can’t really be called finished, but at least it’s largely assembled.

I also made myself a new morris dancing waistcoat, and returned to dancing out for the first time since the frozen shoulders hit:

Appropriately apple coloured for Ely Apple Day, where we danced valiantly in intervals of freezing cold wind between the showers of heavy rain.

I read that the penny whistle was a lot easier to play than the recorder, so I bought a Clarke’s original in D and was pleased to find out that it was true.  After a fair amount of practice, I’ve learned to play one of the side’s dance tunes (and half of two others).  But what I haven’t done this week is much writing.  Partly this is because, yet again, I have sick children at home.

Partly, however,  it’s because I’ve reached the climactic battle in Under the Hill, and I realized that I didn’t know how Ben, Geoff and Chris (and Oonagh, Liadain and Sumala) could all be contrived to get there at just about the same time.  Or how to contain Liadain’s army for long enough for the opposition to arrive (because she’s going to want to start rampaging across the countryside immediately, and I can’t allow that.)  Or what to do with the two Eurofighter Typhoons I set on Chris in the last chapter.  Obviously those two last things go together nicely, so that’s good.  But the trouble is that the elves have spent so long lying to their respective humans that I’m finding it hard to remember what exactly everyone knows at this point.  It’s going to be hard to make the truth apparent without halting the battle for them all to have an earnest conversation and compare notes.

It’s also proving difficult to write because I’ve got to the point where the end is in sight, and I’m therefore psychologically sabotaging myself in an effort to make sure I never finish.  This happens to me with every book, so I recognize the pattern, but it doesn’t make it any easier to drive myself over the roadblock and forge on to the end.  I will, though.  I really will, just as soon as Rose goes back to school.