Pocket problem

A whole ago (2, maybe 3 years ago?) I started making a dress, & then I had to move the sewing machine off the kitchen table, so pushed the dress into the bag & left it for a 'little while'. I pulled it out & finished it last year, & I'm pretty happy with it. Y'know, considering I made no pattern alterations, which since I'm short with curvature of the spine & big boobs, would have probably been a good idea...

Anyway, I'd not worn it much this summer, and it is a summer dress, & it's been hot, & of course I've not been at work, so it would have been good to wear it. 

2 things were stopping me:

1) the ends of the back ties were fraying, oddly enough since I'd not actually finished them in any way... 

2) there are no pockets on it. So no-where for vital supplies, like inhaler, keys, dog poo bags, & yeah, okay, my phone. 

(Feel free to insert a longer rant about how stupid pockets are on women's clothes. I had a pair of trousers a friend gave me, & the pockets were so small, even a lip balm or lipstick would fall out. & don't get me started on clothes with mock pockets!) 

For a while now, I'm making a conscious decision not to buy clothes without pockets. (Unless they'd be really impractical, I don't believe I need pockets on bras. Although, you can get bras with pockets for optional padding.) But skirts, dresses, trousers, dressing gowns, pyjamas... etc, need pockets. I will make an exception for charity shop clothes if they're otherwise perfect for my needs. 

So why didn't I add pockets to the dress as I made it? Umm, well, the pattern didn't call for them. & once I'd finished it, pockets were an annoyingly tricky problem to solve. 

The dress, you see, is reversible. I don't mean you can wear it back to front, it's fully lined so you can wear it with either material showing & the dress is just the same. 

I've sorted the problems of my summer pyjamas not having pockets (this was more of a problem than my winter pyjamas not having pockets either, as my winter dressing gown does have pockets). I cut the "short" (3/4 length) trousers down to knee length & used the material I'd cut off to make pockets. (The patch pockets work better than the inset bag pockets, both in my execution of them & in the comfort of pockets in pyjama trousers.)

So. I need to put pockets on the dress. I spent a while earlier in the kitchen with the dress on, safety pins ready for marking & my phone on selfie mode so I could see what I was doing.  & I think I'm happy with the planned placement.

(Not too happy with my posture here!) 

& I've drafted a pocket pattern with the plan to cut 4 pocket shapes, hem them & then attach about where indicated by the safety pins.  (I did think at the time about writing a post about my lovely punk dress. But let's be honest, the safety pins are the only thing that could possibly qualify this as a punk dress. So just a bit more waffle.) 

I was procrastinating, not just because I need to get the iron & ironing board out, & it's just too hot for ironing. But also because I was thinking "Eurgh, I need to get those pockets exactly the same place each side so I only need to (machine) sew them once each side to attach both pockets. That's going to be so fiddly, I'll just put it off in case the shoemaker's elves come & do it for me."

So after sitting on the sofa in the comparative coolth (what do you mean, there's no such word as coolth? It's the opposite of warmth!) of the living room watching TV & knitting, I turned to sitting on the sofa reading sewing blogs.  & Steely Seamstress writing in 2014 about a jacket she was making (&, being less of a procrastinator than me, has probably long finished) talked about how she was going to have to slip stitch the pockets onto the jacket (as the material was too thick to be able to go through her sewing machine with all the layers that this would entail). "Aha!" I thought, "once I've hemmed them, I can slip stitch them onto the dress!"

So, I'm importantly writing about them first, as it is still too hot for ironing. But we have a plan!