She decided not to be a tree, is the thing.

If she wanted to never do anything awkward or embarrassing or suboptimal again, she could go back to the starlit forest and lie down in the dirt and wait, and then she would be a tree, and she would never have any problems ever again.

But instead she wants to live in her Cozy Cave House and read books and grow strawberries.

It's not that making the occasional could-be-better dress is strictly necessary to her chosen lifestyle. It's just that... she decided that as long as she's not hurting anyone she would rather be alive than dead. And she suspects that, if she listens to the part of her that wants to do everything perfectly all the time, she will eventually end up doing nothing at all, waiting for perfection to happen by itself. Which is definitely tree behaviour.

In conclusion, it is time to go get some bark.

She meditates through the bridge to the forest, and walks a little ways away from where she dug up that sackful of dirt, and asks a few more trees for their bark. She'd rather not take too much from any one tree, no matter how happy they are to give it to her, and if she's going to be seriously trying to create acceptable clothes then she might need to try multiple different approaches so she'd better have plenty of materials or she'll have to keep coming back here.

Arms laden with bark, she returns home.

For lack of a more sensible work surface, she piles up the bark on her kitchen counter, then fetches the book on leathercraft and sits down to read it.

It's short, and not all that applicable to her tool-less attempt to make an entire outfit out of leather. If she needed a belt she'd be all set. A wallet or purse, likewise. A dress not so much. But it's more information than she had before she read it, and it at least helps her think about things like how to construct a reasonable seam.

She puts the book aside, grabs the top piece of bark off the stack, and starts trying to figure out how to make a sort of bodice situation out of it. It would be convenient if her kitchen had a mirror. Actually, she's just going to carry this piece of bark to her bathroom and wrap it awkwardly around herself and stare at it in the mirror a lot.

(She immediately remembers, when she gets to the bathroom, that there was another bathroom that was much closer to the kitchen. Oh well. Its mirror was probably smaller, anyway.)

After some uncertain squinting in the mirror, she tentatively coaxes the piece of bark to fold in a few places, then takes it back to the kitchen table to work on it. In theory, if she makes a nice neat row of holes along this edge and another nice neat row of holes along that fold line, and uses what she learned from making her bracelet to make a long cord, she can string the cord through the laces and this other folded bit will lie behind the laces and she will have a sort of vest that laces up in front and doesn't make her look like a—doesn't make her look bad. And the lacing up in front will hopefully make it both more obvious and more true that it stays up on its own.

She gets to work.

Making the holes nice and neat and all in a straight line is difficult, especially since she has to patiently coax the bark into allowing each one, but she works at it slowly and carefully and it goes faster than she would've thought from how slow and careful she's being. Then she has to make the cord, which turns out to be more difficult than making her little bracelet but not by that much especially once she figures out that braiding three sort of dubious strands together can make one cord that's much less dubious than the sum of its parts.

She patiently threads the cord through the holes, and takes the whole situation into the bathroom, and wiggles out of her dress to check the fit, and wouldn't you know it! She has made a garment! It looks sort of odd, and some of the edges are rougher than she'd like, but: garment!

She immediately takes it off and wiggles back into her dress, because she does not feel comfortable wandering around the house like that even though the house has no windows and also no entrances or exits.

Then it's back to the kitchen island to work on a skirt. A wrap skirt, maybe, if she has a big enough piece of bark for that to be sensible... she digs through the pile, and eventually finds one that looks about right.

She probably doesn't need a mirror for this part but she goes back to the bathroom anyway, and rearranges the sheet of bark several times, and politely requests that it fold here and seal there and separate over there, and with the separated bit she makes a much thicker braided cord to use as a sort of belt strung through the folded-over waistline, and when she tries it on with the lace-up bodice she definitely looks a little bizarre but now it's a more intentional kind of bizarre. Acceptable.

She hangs up the old dress in her wardrobe, and gives it a little pat, and goes back to her kitchen island intending to make shoes.

When she gets there, though, and is sorting through the pile again, she sees a strip of bark that's a little narrower and a lot longer than the one she used to make her bodice, and she is seized by inspiration and drags it back to the bathroom to try to figure out how to construct a loincloth.

The less said about this process, the better.

At the end of it, though, she has a reasonable approximation of underwear, and the world is accordingly a better place than it was twenty minutes ago.

Now she can work on shoes.

Her current shoes are... sort of okay... but they are also very visibly made out of weird scraps cobbled (heh) together by a complete amateur, and she can do better than that just by being careful and intentional about which pieces of bark she uses and how she puts them together. And she can add laces. Laces, it turns out, are pretty important.

So, if she folds this bit here, and that bit over there... remembering to do everything symmetrically on both shoes, by far the worst thing about her current shoes is how much she didn't do that... and then she takes them off to make all the holes for the laces, again being very careful to keep everything symmetrical...

Triumph! Success! Shoes!

They're a sort of lace-up slipper that goes up just past her ankles, and they don't have weird extraneous bits that flap around awkwardly when she walks in them, and she is very pleased with herself.

She puts her other shoes just outside the doorway from the sitting room to the garden; they can be her gardening shoes, maybe.

All the rest of the pile of bark gets folded up as neatly as she can manage and left at the far end of the kitchen counter, in the corner by the breakfast table. She could put it in a cabinet, but there are a lot of cabinets and she's sort of afraid she'll forget which one.

And now, she has utterly lost track of the time, even to the extent that she knew what time it was before, which she mostly didn't.

She takes stock of herself. Does she feel like sleeping? Yeah, kind of.

So she puts her new clothes away in her closet and leaves her new shoes next to her bed and figures out how to turn the lights off (there's a switch by the door, but it's a dimmer knob and looked decorative), and she curls up and goes to sleep.

One restful sleep later, she sits up, opens her eyes, and says, "Oh heck, I forgot about the sand!"

Hurrying into her clothes and out to the garden reveals... that the red sand has taken over most of the middle of the sand garden, but there's a border of white sand left around the edge, about as wide as her hand.

"Whew."

Yawning, she trundles over to the pantry and grabs another little bread roll to have for breakfast. The Cozy Cave is lovely but she really wants to figure out a way to import the forest's multicoloured starlight. She's barely spent a few hours of her life under it all told, and she already feels like she won't be properly awake until she's had some. Bread first, though. Oh, she should figure out if the bathroom has toothbrushes...

After stumbling through an approximation of a morning routine, and putting her shoes on, and taking a few minutes just to sit in the armchair in her library and smile at the books, she feels ready to face the day.

Before she was interrupted by sartorial necessity, she was planning to visit the Planet of College Girls and see if she can populate her garden somehow or other using plants she finds there.

She thinks, overall, that she would still like to do that. Well, no, she's moderately terrified of doing that, but... she wants strawberries, and this is a way to get strawberries, and although she doesn't really have the first clue how to go from "traversing a bridge to the College Girls Planet" to "having strawberries growing in her garden", she's not going to get more of a clue by sitting around being afraid of talking to strangers. Sitting around being afraid of talking to strangers is tree behaviour.

...maybe she could stay in and read one book first, though...

No! That is the Dirt Voice talking! That is the siren lure of the grave!