Costly mistakes

Well, I went up to Sharon’s yesterday, and we took a look at the coat and dress.  Apparently my catchstitching in the dress hem was too tight, so the top of the hem is puckering.  All those tiny catchstitches will need to be taken out and redone.  We might be able to salvage something by cutting and easing some of the sections, but it’s not clear how much we’ll be able to get away with.  Also, there’s some chance that the problem actually lies with the bias binding…in which case it all might need to be redone.

We also discovered that, through an error in cutting, the dress lining is about 1-2″ too short.  And that the six or seven hours of prick-stitching that I put into the coat facing was not tight enough or deep enough to keep the ribbon from rolling…so that will also need to be redone, possibly with an extra line of prickstitching along the other edge of the ribbon to keep the ribbon flat.

This is pretty discouraging news, especially in the face of a looming deadline.  April 5 is only 30 days away…which sounds like a lot, but even the 100-120 hours of work I can put in before then seems like a drop in the bucket compared to all the work that still needs doing.

So I am feeling pretty discouraged.

On the other hand, all is not lost, either.  Sharon is taking on the coat, and will try to get it done this week.  Not my first choice – I’d rather do it all myself – but I need to measure out my time carefully between now and the deadline.  Meanwhile, I’m going to continue work on the dress, finishing up the back lace, assembling the second lining, redoing the hems, and hemming the sleeves.  I’ll also run up to Britex Fabrics to see if they have any lace edgings I can use on the bottom of the too-short lining.

And next weekend Sharon and I will meet up again, and see how much progress we’ve made.  Hopefully next week’s results will be different!