What Sort of Puckery Is This?

Today's sewing marathon began quite well. We sent Thomas down to his cave to avoid seeing the dress, and got to work on the train.

Thomas in his man cave

We found some lace to put on the train to cover up the seam and it looks like it was meant to be there all the time. This lace was something we'd bought much earlier and then changed our minds about using, then tried to find different ways to use. We had thought about putting on the lining, putting it on the straps, putting around vases, and then put it away all together. It was resurrected today and put to good use.
 

Flowers on the train

Then, we got back to the button looping. It all seemed so easy, so nearly in hand! We had sewn the looping on last time we'd worked on the dress. We wanted to see if it was laid out correctly, so Steph got into the dress for us to see.

And then we found a pucker. The annoying pucker was due to the lace over-skirt not matching up quite right. It was a little difference, but led to a large pucker down the train.

Sewing on the buttons

We thought maybe all we needed to rip out was a little of the looping over the skirt, but that annoying pucker would not go away, so Jenny was forced to take it off all the way down. Once that was resewn, it was time to put the buttons on. Still relatively early, we could get this done with daylight to spare.

Daylight spared no one, however. The buttons proved trickier than we'd expected. We sewed, removed, repositioned, resewed, removed, repositioned, and resewed till after 8 PM. One problem was that puckers would appear if the buttons were not positioned exactly right.

Another unexpected problem was that we had more loops for buttons than buttons; eight more, in fact. However, we didn't notice this deficiency until we'd sewn on several buttons. I was sewing on one end, Jenny on the other. We'd meet in the middle of the looping. Or not.

With two buttons left, I went looking for the missing eight, and realized we were short. This meant removing eight of the ones we'd already sewn and moving them up to the gap in the middle. Sewing on each button was more time consuming than it would seem. Finally they were all sewn on. We will wait until tomorrow to see if we placed them all correctly, or if we need to remove, reposition, and resew any.