Not obvious progress, but...

[amethyst73]

Note to self: get a pair of pinking shears the next time you do something like this.

After ~ 1 hour, I've got the dratted collar pieces together, and 'finished'.  (Not attached to the dress, mind you - that comes next.)  The 'finishing' instructions on the pattern were: Sew a seam about 1/8th inch from edge.  Finish with 1. pinking 2. overcasting, 3. overlocking, or 4. fold over seam and sew again.  I looked up definitions of overcasting and overlocking, and one of them involved having a machine that could sew zigzags - the one I'm using is straight-seam only.  Overcasting looked like it could be done by hand.  So I spent 40 minutes doing an atrociously bad overcast by hand, on about a quarter of the length I needed.  This was obviously a Bad Idea and would take forever to boot, so I tried the fold-over method, which worked fine and was rather faster (20 minutes for the remaining 3/4 of the length).

I don't think I'll be finishing this today, but that's okay.  I have the weekend, and both Monday and Tuesday nights.  I'll see if I can get the collar attached tonight.  But now it is time to go to the grocery!

Comments

[hoshikage.livejournal.com]

Just a note - I personally have never found pinking shears to be of that much use for seam-finishes/preventing fraying. Even zigzagging over the raw edge isn't really that great, but of course it depends a lot on your fabric's propensity for fraying. YMMV of course. :)

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

That's good to know. The fabric in this case is 100% cotton, so not hugely fray-ish. Not like, say, velvet. ;)

The really weird thing in this case, is that there's interfacing affixed to the wrong side of the fabric of the collar piece. And once I've got the collar piece attached to the dress, it looks like it then gets pressed to the inside of the dress. This makes the whole finishing business look a little moot to me - wouldn't the interfacing (assuming it were properly ironed on; I was probably too careful in the ironing process and it keeps coming unstuck) kind of prevent that in the first place?

[hoshikage.livejournal.com]

*shakes head* I don't trust anything save really proper seam-finishes, myself. Give me a real serger, French-seam, flat-felled seam, something, or whatever I make will fall apart, pretty much guaranteed. Of course, I do seem to have astonishingly bad luck on construction-sturdiness fronts, so by now overengineering in self-defense is basically automatic for me.

As for the interfacing issue, I've never had good luck with such iron-on stuff either - I know other people manage quite well with it, but I can't figure out how for the life of me, since fusible stuff never sticks even long enough for me to sew it down afterwards, no matter what weight I'm using. It all seems very unfair. :P