My afternoon's work:

This is the status of the swan dress after a little bit of work on it (heck, it was about an hour and a half!) this afternoon. I finished sewing the neck, stuffed it very blobbily with polyfill (is there a better way to do it to make it non-blobby? my cursory google-ing didn't come up with anything...), made more ruffles, and started sewing ruffle strips onto panels. The individual components of the dress are looking good to me at this point, but I'm really not quite certain in my head of how it's all going to come together--especially the fastening bit. I absolutely don't want to do a zipper. Ties would be easiest (the white skirt I was going to use as a base ties at the sides) but I don't know how they'll look. I'm also not quite certain how to finish the join between the neck/chest fabric (you can see it sort of hanging down from one side of the neck in this photo) and the skirt. In my mind it's a big mass of feathers and tulle but I really don't want to sew that many feathers. (And I'm NOT going the hot-glue route after spending all this time on sewing together the skirt!)

The machine that made it all possible. SO. MUCH. BETTER. To start with, the drive belt isn't held together by two staples. Thanks to my sweetheart for bringing it down for me. (Did I pick the right guy or what? This is actually HIS sewing machine, a lovely old Sears picked up at some sort of sale or another.)