I’m about five and a half hours into sewing Cersei (general intentions are here, if you missed them), and it’s been an adventure. No major disasters, but so many little things have gone wrong:
– Staystitch side edge of front above waist. Well great, I didn’t mark the waist. Guess I’m eyeballing it. (No ill effects obvious to date.)
– Stitch upper side front to lower side front. Um…you’ve got an outie and an innie…how do I sew those together? Incorrectly, the first time. (The intermediate step of staystitching the lower edge of the upper side front [the innie] means you can stretch it along the outie for stitching and then afterwards it sort of flexes back into place.)
– Stitch side front to front. The hems line up wrong, and not the way I planned. So much for the brilliant curtain hem intentions. It’ll all turn out fine when I put in the final hem.
– Basically repeat the above for the back and side back. I should probably mention here I’m too lazy to use pins, except for really tricky spots. The bigger mistake is keep forgetting to reverse the stitch at the beginning and end of my seams, to lock them in place…
– As mentioned, I’m skipping the ties.
– Stitch front to back. It finally starts to look like a thing! It’s not super fitted, so I could take in some seams if I wanted, but I think it looks okay. I’ll just have to be very specific about the hemming the front flap so it doesn’t spill over into the contrast section.
– The facing is really where it started getting weird. I hemmed the lower edge of the front, but I typically don’t press, so I missed turning in the seam allowance. And the hem of the back facing is atrocious – another outie, so it’s all wrinkled and overlapped. Stitched front to back okay, but then:
– I added the improvised collar when I stitched the facing to the dress. That step was mostly fine, but when I understitched the facing, I caught a bunch of extra fabric in several different spot and had to rip it out and re-stitch piecemeal (if I did the whole seam over again, it would probably just be worse.)
– Then, it didn’t actually say to, but I slipstitched the lining hem (instead of the armhole facing. And I had it on the dress form by this point. And the slipstitch went through the incredibly thin fabric covering the dress form. So I had to do that over.
– Finally, it was sleeve time! I got all the giant pieces together just fine, but then I started adding the sleeve band and my extra piece of darker contrast. As a single seam, they went on fine. But then I had to slipstitch both the band and the rest of the darker contrast. And I caught lots of bits of the outer sleeve fabric…that was folded under from another part of the sleeve. So I had to fix that, too. I finally got the first sleeve done and am hoping to avoid that problem when I pick up on finishing the second sleeve.
Normally the next step after this would be attaching sleeves to dress, but I am going to have a lot of quiet down time away from home next week, so I think I’ll work on embroidering the sleeves (which even though voluminous are smaller than the dress) before I attach them.