Ascendance of a Bookworm Part 1 Volume 3

Completion of My Outfit and Hairpin

My temperature finally went down two days after I had caught a fever. Remaking the outfit would be a lot riskier than I had expected. At this rate I would catch another fever before Mom was finished.

With those thoughts in mind, I climbed out of bed and went looking for Mom. In the kitchen, I saw the table pulled up close to the hearth with Mom and Tuuli making progress on their handiwork. It seemed that she couldn't work on the outfit while I was out of commission and had shifted her focus to the handiwork instead.

"Oh hello, Myne. Has your fever gone down? That's perfect, we can get back to reworking your outfit." Mom cleaned up her handiwork somewhat regretfully and spread out the outfit.

"Where's Dad? Is he on morning shift?"

"Noon shift, but so much snow fell he left early."

The city guard was also assigned to clearing the main road of snow. They received special pay for their work, but Dad always grumbled over his beer that the pay didn't match how exhausting it was.

"Okay, Myne. Please put it on."

I flinched a little at the sight of the thin, short-sleeved outfit. If I wore it like Mom wanted I would end up with another fever, hearth or no hearth. "Mom, can I at least wear a long-sleeved shirt underneath it?"

"The clothes won't be a perfect fit if you do that, sweetie." "That's fine. I'll get bigger by the time summer comes around."

Mom put a hand on her cheek and looked at me dubiously. She looked over me as if thinking back to how much I had grown in the past, then sighed. "I understand how you feel, Myne... But that doesn't seem likely."

A-At least say you believe in me, Mom! Still, she allowed me to wear a long-sleeved shirt beneath the outfit so that I wouldn't catch another cold.

"Your shoulders are what don't match the most. What should we do about that?"

Mom was right. When I put on Tuuli's special outfit, the most loose and unsightly part ended up being the shoulders. So I tried scrunching them up, and this transformed the outfit into an off-shoulder dress that had nice loops around the top of my arms.

"Now we just need to make shoulder straps out of string or pieces of cloth. If we have any scraps of cloth left over from when you first made this, it'll be a perfect fit. If not, blue string should work. It'll match the sash and embroidery just fine."

"I have some left over, yes. Plenty for shoulder straps."

Mom went and got some scraps of cloth from the cloth basket. After twisting it into a string shape, she sewed it onto the shoulders of my outfit. The dress that once slipped off my shoulders became an off-shoulder camisole.

"Perfect, now it won't fall off your shoulders."

Mom nodded in satisfaction, then furrowed her brows and pointed at the armpit of the outfit. Due to bundling up the cloth around the shoulders, the rippling cloth had ended up gathered by the armpit.

"Myne, the armpit looks terrible with all that cloth in it. What can we do about that?"

"Well, I'm going to be wearing a wide sash, so I don't think a little extra cloth by the armpit is a problem."

"No. It looks terrible."

"Okay, then what if we sew them into proper pleats? It'll take time, but I think it'll look really cute."

I tried taking the apparently terrible-looking cloth by the armpit and put it into three equidistant folds from the chest to the side. Sewing them into place would be annoying, but there wouldn't be any excess cloth and the chest would look fancier.