spacealien_vamp | One more hour of sewing (Reply)

When I left off working on my yukata sleeve last time, it looked like this diagram: right sides together, with the yellow line machine-stitched and the purple dotted line hand-stitched (the ends of the threads left dangling).

The next step is to form the curve of the sleeve. Place a cardboard cutout that matches the arc of the curve just slightly inside the yellow line and fold the material over it, pinning it in place at either end of the curve. Pull the ends of the hand-stitched threads to gather the corner. Iron the gathered material and then lightly backstitch the gathers in place. Remove the cardboard cutout.

After that, it's time to hem the wrist opening. Fold the edge of the fabric over twice to make a narrow hem and sew it with stitches roughly 1cm (~3/8") apart.

I was pretty slow at hemming the wrist opening, so I only managed to finish one sleeve by the end of the hour.

In other news, today was my last day of classes for the year. I still have to go in to work tomorrow, but there aren't any classes, just cleaning and an assembly.

<random linguistic musing>
One of the teachers who went on the Australia trip asked me whether "asthma" had "the" in front of it when explaining one's medical condition. I didn't think much of it at the time, but this morning I pondered it further. We have a number of conditions that use "the" in front of them, such as "I have the measles" and "I have the flu," yet we have a number that don't use "the" in front of them, such as "I have chicken pox" and "I have pneumonia." I tried to figure out whether there was any kind of pattern, such as severity of the disease, but nothing came to me. How is a non-native speaker to know whether to use "the" or not?