Ruby was elated she was being given a chance, not necessarily because she was desperate – although she was – but because this woman here was the only one so far who had given her the chance to actually prove herself. She wasn’t being recognized yet, but just having an opportunity was like a breath of fresh air.
She was aware that the old elf had a mind for business and that was still willing to try something new for the sake of her store.
Maybe she was desperate too? Just playing hard to get?
She didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. This was basically a one-year internship. All she had to do now was pass the bloody test and be done with it, nothing more to it than that. Besides, knowing now that she would be put to knit more scarves made her happy. Maybe she would have the possibility of making some for the other children if Opal gave her the chance.
To her surprise, the older woman led her to the back of the store immediately, where her workshop was.
The place gave similar vibes to her own workshop back on Earth. Sure, this one seemed to be a much older, antique even, version of her own, but held itself in a similar fashion. The wooden boards of the place creaked under her weight like the ones she had in her old attic, the air was mildly stale, and the lighting was simply powered by an oil lamp.
It brought back memories, but she decided for her own sake to stay in the moment.
“Girl, see that dress over there?” The woman’s thick accent made her pay more attention than normal.
The woman did not wait for a reply. “I’ve been asked to resize it. Mrs. Nuggalys has been indulging too much in her own biscuits, now needs the whole thing altered again. I am not in love with doing the same task twice when I already did it just a month ago.”
“Is she a baker?”
“Best on this side of the bridge. Just married, too. Again. This is like her fourth husband, she has a thing for humans I suppose.
“Do you know what to do, Girl?”
If the woman had gained weight, she would need to use extra fabric in a worst case scenario, but before she could even make any conjectures and know the exact thing she needed to do, there was something she required first.
“Depends. Do you have the measurements?”
“Do I have the measurements? Do you take me for a novice, girl? Been over two hundred years in this business. The details are over there. You have until the end of the day, I’ll come back then.”
Before Ruby could even reply, the woman was already closing the door shut behind her.
Ruby just stared for a second at the door, just in case the woman came back or something. Once she noticed she wasn’t, she thawed.
Just looking around, Ruby felt like she had suddenly become one of those children you hear about in the news who work in sweatshops.
“Great, I work for SHEIN now.” She mumbled to herself, trying to understand the layout of the place.
Leaving aside her little worries of making a deal with the devil, she just sat for a second, trying to relax. Aurelia tried to hide it, but she had been coming home with bruises over the past few days, her face showing nothing but determination. If she was trying this hard, Ruby knew she could do it too. It was just a one year thing. She could do this.
“Tits up, Ruby. Let’s do this thing.”
She cracked her neck and fingers before plopping down in a hardwood chair next to the oil lamp. Her hands moved dexterously and with experience along the dress, looking for seams and the kind of stitch used.
The table was bare with the exception of the dress, the lamp, and a little piece of parchment Ruby figured contained the measurements. Knowing Opal had only given her until the end of the day, meant she could guess this was a quick fix, so she instantly got up once more and started to look for tools.
In a cabinet she found a couple of old worn needles, a short ‘ruler’ thing made of some weird bending wood, and a thick white thread.
Then, she got to examine the dress. It felt like it was made of low-quality linen, but couldn’t quite tell if there were new-world-shenanigans going on. She would treat it as linen though. The white dress was clearly an undergarment after further examination, remembering how the women around these parts used to dress.
“What is this? A smock? Gotta be. This is so weird.”
A smock was basically a thin white dress used under the normal dress. She remembered some not having sleeves and being on the short side of things, usually reaching all the way to the knees. However, this one seemed to be one more adequate for the cold climate of the city, being much longer, thicker, and with sleeves included. Interestingly so, it was more for daily wear than night-wear, since it seemed to be quite form-fitting.
“Makes sense if you’re using it with a corset I suppose…” She wasn’t the most knowledgeable about older garments, but it was probably tight around the torso so the corset didn’t make the rest of the body look chunky with extra fabric.
As her eyes examined the smock, Ruby noticed not only the original stitching of the garment, but also the changes Mrs. Opal had made before, clearly noticing where new thread had replaced the old one and where the changes were made.
“This is so weird.” She repeated.
Her eyebrows rose as she used for the first time the bendy-wood ruler to check out the measurements the woman had inscribed.
“No measuring tape, but a bendy rule?” The thing was a bit freaky, considering that it looked made of wood but could bend around her wrist without problems. She tried to think of what kind of tree could give this kind of wood and could only think of a wobbly palm tree or that one tree from the Harry Potter saga. It also didn’t have measurements in inches or centimeters either. The scroll just said things like ‘Four-and-a-half markers’ and ‘Two markers and a bit’, making the thing almost completely useless for Ruby.
It was at least… enlightening.
“Assuming ‘a bit’ is like an inch…”
Leaving aside the weird chills she was getting from using the new instrument, she compared the measurements and then noticed she still had enough fabric to work with, which was an enormous relief.
She didn’t have much experience yet handling garments from this world, but she could tell many were constructed in a similar way. Because not everyone could afford new clothes whenever they grew up in size, the garments would always have additional fabric in the inside, giving the opportunity to just cut the thread and sew it again to resize it.
Ruby had been nervous knowing it had been resized once already. Usually, there’s no more room to resize beyond one or two inches, so if Mrs. Opal had already used some of that fabric and now she had to do it again, she was afraid she wouldn’t have any fabric to work with. Fortunately, now she was sure she could pull this off.
There was no scissor, but there was a knife she found a couple of minutes later. Now knowing she had the whole rest of the day for this task, she took her time to get acquainted with the workshop as well. Snooping around the different cabinets she found different tools. A few more bendy rules of different sizes and a couple of shelves holding an array of thread wooden bobbins, though the thread itself was mostly white in color.
There were a few buckets that showed signs of working with dyes before, but she couldn’t find anything that resembled recent work. Had they stopped doing it? Maybe they were trying to find their own dying method. In the beginning it was a highly coveted secret, never being easy to find a dye that actually sticks to the textile and that doesn’t fade easily with time.
By the back of the place, there was a big cabinetry with long thick wooden shelves. The doors had no glass, so you couldn’t know what was inside, but opening it revealed a bunch of fabrics.
There was a lot of cotton and linen, both in different conditions and processed in different ways. The wool, for instance, was both held in a canister in little yarn balls like the ones she had used for her scarves, but also neatly rolled like a big fluffy parchment.
Despite the somber and lapidated look of the place, it still made her feel at home. Kind of. It was a good feeling that she hoped would last.
“It’s a wonder how these things are not full of moth holes…” She whispered to herself.
Her eyes graced the other pieces of furniture around, noticing a few more chairs and tables that could be used for work. She remembered, then, that another girl was already being mentored by Mrs. Opal, and while she understood her own special reasons as to why she was doing this, it was hard to grasp why someone else would try the same thing. Maybe the woman was of renown around these parts? She did say she had been in the ‘industry’ for over two hundred years, which Ruby believed whole-heartedly at this point.
She didn’t dally for long though, and soon enough got back to her work. Considering she would have to sew by hand the whole mid-section, it was best to start sooner rather than later. However, being adept at what she did, her mind did start to wander as her hands moved quickly without trepidation.
“She should be a Medium now.” She said to herself, noticing how the measurements had changed since the creation of the garment. It was strange how, despite having the bendy-rule for measures, there still didn’t exist any standard-sized clothes.
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In the Gilded Mirror, just like every clothing store in the city she had seen so far, Ruby noticed they did sell clothes that were already made, but most of the business came from making custom-made outfits or making adjustments to clothes already made. Like she was doing just now.
Apparently, standard-sized clothes were not exactly a thing. Most dresses and shirts were made using the measurements of a tailor model usually glued to a stick or made of wire, which means that all clothes made by the same Tailor or Seamstress always had the same measurements as the model used. This always implied that, unless you had the same body proportions as the model, you would need to make adjustments to the garment.
There were a few of those around in the workshop as well as in the store itself, used to display simple outer-wear linen dresses in brown colors.
Back on Earth, the experience had been different. She didn’t remember many details from her classes, but she knew that once tailors had found a way to measure the body in a more accurate manner, some guy created the all-known standard shirt. Then came other clothing garments in their standard size and, finally, the rest of the sizes.
“Food for thought, maybe they could work here too?” She thought while her hands were busy, slowly removing pieces of cut thread that would not work anymore. “Or would they?” The different races in the world were something to consider, but she didn’t know enough about them yet to think about that in depth. Maybe one day she would have enough for a few books on that. Maybe.
“Enough, focus Amy. I mean, RUBY! Damn it.” She massaged her temples for a second before getting back to work. Eyes focused on her work.
The needle was a bit on the thick side, considering that it was linen she was working with. While it wouldn’t break the fabric or anything, she knew that a better result would come from a thinner needle, but hadn’t been able to find another one that could do a better job.
Now that she was thinking about it, the whole task given was very simple in a sense.
While knowing what needed to be resized was easy as cake, it was slightly challenging sewing when there was so little fabric to work with. There had been like an inch of extra fabric, which is exactly the amount that she needed to expand. Not only would the smock was going to end with no extra fabric in each seam, but also it was going to be easier for the fabric to tear, as there was little to no extra fabric to help the seam hold.
“Maybe I should go for a double rundown of the thing, or the thread will not hold if the woman keeps eating like this. Hah,” She snorted. “Hell of a biscuit if she’s going from a Small to a Medium in less than…”
Her hands stopped.
“From Small to Medium… From a Small to a Medium!”
Slowly, her eyes went wide at the realization.
“Of course! How could I have been so stupid!? Humans are good at doing that I would guess.”
She blushed for a second while she took the garment in a new light.
If she was correct, then she had been tackling this from the wrong angle. Even if she was giving the smock another inch through the mid-section, it was still going to feel tight around the belly once the woman kept on increasing in size. Then, the whole thing would be a waste, as she would need to buy new clothes anyhow and this one would require another resize once she stopped being pregnant.
But was she really?
There were many things she didn’t know about the new races. Maybe there is an actual race that gets bigger in size pretty fast that she didn’t know anything about. “Maybe Mrs. Nugget or whatever is just stress-eating? New marriage can be stressful.”
Honestly, she was pretty sure the woman was pregnant. She had to be. Her intuition with this kind of thing rarely led her astray, but what could she do? Should she do something? Maybe this was the real test. The test hidden behind the test?
She was grasping at straws here.
The questions were many, but it didn’t take her long to come to the decision of just doing something. She had told Mrs. Opal she was very confident in her skills, she had to show she could do something beyond just basic sewing. Was there a chance this would play against her and put her mentorship at risk? Yes, but playing it safe was not going to cut it if she really wanted to prove herself.
A big part of her believed that the older elf would not hesitate to kick her out or change her mind if she made even a slight mistake. She had to go big, she had to show she was more than just some troublemaker. Showing Mrs. Opal she had a lot of value and that she could think on her feet would most likely give her space to breathe.
“Now, how do I do this?”
The only thing she had was white thread. Adding extra fabric was impossible, mostly because she didn’t want to touch Mrs. Opal’s materials without asking beyond just the thread.
Her eyes landed on the lower part of the smock, an eyebrow raising as an idea crept up.
----------------------------------------
“Ohoho, but you’re still so young Mrs. Nuggalys, don’t let rumors take the spring in your step. You only live once, so might as well enjoy it.”
“Ohohoho, Opal, you’re still so naughty as always. But I have to say, he sure knows how to take care of me.”
“Ohoho, now look who’s being the naughty one.”
Both women laughed as they kept on chatting for a while, arriving a while ago and staying in the store-side of the building. It was a bit unnerving how both women laughed like you would expect 16th century women did, hiding their laughs with gloved hands despite the simplicity of their girl talk. Guys and clothes, that’s all they talked about and the occasional skill or something, but never in direct ways.
They kept on mentioning stuff like ‘May I use my skill?’, or ‘I leveled the other day.’, but never explaining stuff, so Ruby didn’t really get to learn much of their conversation. The wooden wall not being enough to really hide their chat.
It was good distraction, considering that her brain was screaming that she had ran out of time and she was going to get killed for doing this, but it was already too late. She had to finish this now or she was dead anyway, so might as well.
Her fingers kept on moving as fast as possible, sewing the garment like her life depended on it. She was never a fan of putting all her apples in the same basket, but she kind of had like… one apple at the moment? So there was no choice but to pull it off now.
“So, Opal my friend, I hate to ruin this with work-talk, but have you had a chance to look at my smock? I promised Frederick he would see me with it again soon enough, if you know what I mean.” Ruby couldn’t see it, but she guessed there was a wink included right there and then.
“Oh, Miranda, I’ve been swamped with work lately so I can’t recall very well if I did your piece. Let me go check, yes?” Ruby looked around the room, searching for possible half-done jobs or things in progress. The only thing she found was a wooden model that had brown fabric on top of it. It wasn’t even cut or pinned into it, just literally covered in fabric.
“Oh yes, of course. I’ll wait here.”
Ruby got nervous. While she had finished, she knew things could go sideways pretty fast now.
“Time to sink or swim.” She thought as Mrs. Opal crossed the threshold, leaving all semblance of composed mirth behind.
Opal’s eyes landed on Ruby first, then on the white linen smock, her eyes growing in alert.
“I can explain!”
“What have you done, girl!? What is this?” She screamed-whispered to her face, looking at the garment up and down.
“I resized it like it should be done.”
“Don’t mock me girl, what is this!?” She asked, pointing at the whole lower side of the garment.
Smocks, in general, are not tight garments, but the woman had one that was much more liberal in the skirt area than the stomach, which was normal considering the size of the petite woman. Otherwise, it would have looked like she was wearing a bed-sheet and nobody wants that.
Knowing how this could affect the baby and the woman’s actual use of the resized garment, she came up with a new plan.
After expanding the dress using the little fabric the seams had, she went and attacked the whole lower area of the linen garment. Cutting the bottom half and making a seam from the inside so it doesn’t look unpolished, she took the extra fabric and went back to the mid-section.
There, right below the bosom area, she added the extra fabric she had gotten from the lower section and sewed it all around. She was basically adding a belt with a ruffle on top right underneath the chest area, but the purpose of it was two-fold. It was not just a matter of design to make it look prettier, but also it was made for functionality.
Adding the ruffle made the whole fabric belt prettier, which in turn made the area above the stomach tighter, pulling and puffing the clothes underneath. This gave the rest of the – now knee high – skirt enough room for the stomach of a pregnant woman. Besides, at the same time, it would give the woman a simple hourglass look without needing to use a corset. To finish up, she added a floral design to the ruffle, hiding the fact that it’s just a piece of cloth she just took from the bottom side of the dress.
“Mrs. Nugget-”
“Nuggalys!” Right, that was the name.
“-your friend is pregnant Mrs. Opal! Look at the measurements again. Don’t you think it’s weird she needed this to be resized again? By doing this, I made sure she wouldn’t need to do it again!”
Opal was livid, not only because the garment looked completely different, but mostly because Ruby had made changes that couldn’t be undone. None of her skills would work to fix something that wasn’t made by mistake, but on purpose.
“You have no brain, girl! Of course I know she’s pregnant, but who do you think she’ll come to when she needs to buy pregnancy clothes, hm? No brain girl, no brain for business! Oh goddess, look at what you’ve done.” She kept on shouting in a half-whisper, the old woman feeling a headache already coming.
“I knew it! You only bring trou-”
“Everything alright back there?” Mrs. Nuggalys’ voice broke through the whispers and heated conversation between the two, making them both stop in complete silence for a second.
“Eh- Ohohoho, of course deary, I’ll be right there! Sometimes I just get lost with so many dresses back here! Ohohoho.” She faked-laughed while one of her hands went to hide her face.
Ruby, instead of deflating, just gave the woman another push, signaling with her eyes to just go out there and show it.
Opal stared at her sternly, but rather sooner than later took the decision of popping out of the workshop with the smock in hand, leaving the final judgment to the client herself.
“Ohoho, here we go Miranda, I am so sorry for the delay.”
“Oh my, is that mine?”
“Eh- Yes, I’m just so very sorry. I entrusted this to my apprentice and I-”
“Oh my God of Night, Opal, my friend, it’s amazing!”
“Yeah, I’m so- wait, you like it?”
“Of course! Leave it to your Seamstress to know your body more than yourself. I only found out yesterday to be honest. Promise me you won’t tell the girls yet? You know how those old hags like to talk.”
“O-of course!”
“Ugh, Opal, you’re a darling. And look at this! It’s so beautiful! Now Mr. Nuggalys is definitely going to die seeing me in this, even when I’m not pregnant!”
“Ohoho, Miranda, that’s too much praise, really.”
“Nonsense! You’ve taught your apprentice amazingly well, I’ll make sure to bring the rest of my clothes for similar adjustments! I mean, have you even analyzed it yet? Wake up, my friend, this is going to be hot topic for sure.”
Opal hadn’t.
Then, with a questionable look, she used [Analyze].
[Basic Pregnancy Linen Gown]
A basic gown adjusted from a simple smock by an unawakaned skilled crafter of no renown. Made of white linen, this gown will adjust itself around the wearers’ belly during pregnancy.
- Adaptable
Ruby had just turned an already existing object into an item as an unawakened.
[https://i.postimg.cc/2yfjLZzc/Chapter-14-Pregnancy-Smock.png]