After about a week of burnout, where I didn’t work much on the dress at all, I’m moving faster than I thought – I finished the dress hem yesterday! I had expected it to take me another day or two at least. But the catchstitching went about three times faster once I “hit my stride” – and fortunately the dress isn’t that flared, so there aren’t miles of hem to sew. Now I just need to put on the back lace, hem the first lining, put in and hem the second lining, slipstitch the lining down where it’s loose, and I’m (unbelievably) DONE!!!
Well, almost. You may recall that I ran out of 4-4.5mm pearls before completing the beading on the back. Alas, my source for the 4-4.5mm pearls is out of stock, and they don’t know when they’ll get more. And there’s no guarantee that the new pearls will match the old pearls, and so on…so I told them to send me three strands of 4.5-5mm pearls instead. Which means I will have to redo the beading. Faugh! That will take another half-day to day. But at least I will have enough pearls to finish it, and the pearls will all be the same size. And I will have two strands of 4-4.5mm pearls to play with afterward. I might make a pearl necklace to go with the dress.
But – despite the pearls setback – I am making a pleasing amount of progress!
Since I can’t finish the dress until the pearls arrive (hopefully on Friday, otherwise Monday), I’m turning my attention to the coat hem, which needs to be treated similarly to the dress hem. I have a good bit more to do on the coat – fix the trim on the bottom of the coat (which currently waves around somewhat), understitch the facing, put in the lining, and hem coat and lining – but I think it should be achievable in the next week or so. So I am pretty psyched.
I probably won’t meet up with Sharon this week, as I’m not at a stage yet where I need help (she will show me what to do with the hem at the facings of the coat, help evaluate hem samples for the lining, and help me attach the second lining to the dress). But I think by next weekend I’ll be able to run up for what will likely be our final meeting (at least vis-a-vis the coat/dress).
It’s amazing being this close to complete! I probably have another 50-75 hours left to go, but I’m within sight of the end. After working on it for nearly a year, this is nothing short of miraculous.
