Coat Progress: This is like a part time job!

I knew I had been spending a lot of time working on my coat this week.  What I didn't realize is that I had spent over 17 hours on it, with over 4.5 hours spent on both Monday and Friday.  To pass the time I've been alternating between audio books and Pandora internet radio.  While hand sewing, I'd listen to books and while using my machine (which is a little loud), I'd switch to Pandora.  I just finished listening to Cold Mountain which is very sad at the end and I was forced to have a little tissue and tears break.  I also listened to some childhood favorites in the Ramona series by Beverly Cleary:  "Ramona Quimby, Age 8" and "Ramona the Brave".  They are read by Stockard Channing, who is brilliant anyway, but she does voices too!!  So fun!!  I got those from the library for my kids, but I figured that I might as well enjoy them too.

Enough about my listening pleasures, here's what I have to show for my time:

The waistband is on!  I unpicked the skirt 4 times.  

• The first time I unpicked it because the waistband was slightly longer than the skirt and looked very bumpy/wavy across the center back.  I used fusible interfacing on the waistband and kind of wish I hadn't.  I sewed it on again using tons of pins and hoped for a better result.  Nope...Unpick #2
• After giving it much thought I decided to pin the skirt to the waistband with a 6/8" seam allowance thereby raising the skirt and giving me a slightly longer length to attach to the waistband which would hopefully match the length of the waistband better.  That worked.  However...as you can see in the photo on the left, the seams on the skirt aren't matching up well with the bodice seams.  They aren't supposed to match up  perfectly, but they should at least be offset equidistant amounts.  The seam on the left is shifted further to the left than the seam on the right is shifted to the right.  That was going to bother me, and I was aiming for no shortcuts so...Unpick #3.
• Couldn't improve the lineup.  So... Unpick #4.  I was going blind trying to unpick black stitches on black piping and pink/black fabric so I switched to pink thread on the spool.  I didn't thread the machine properly and discovered a no-tension nest of thread under the entire line of  my stitching.  I didn't notice the different sound that my machine makes when the top tension is crap.   At least the thread was was pink and I could see it.  So I snipped off the nest, re-stitched it and pulled out the crap line of stitching.  After that I decided I could (and would) live with slightly offset seams.  Unpicking the same seam 4 times is not considered a shortcut.  

So what else did I do?  I sewed on the front facings which make the button placket and I pad-stitched the under collar.  I marked the roll line.  It is not shown on the pattern so you need to figure it out yourself. Between the roll line and the neckline, I marked pad-stitching lines 1/4" apart.  Between the roll line and collar edge, I marked lines 3/8" apart with more stitching lines near the rounded edges of the collar.

Before Pad-Stitching

After Pad-Stitching

The under collar is now pinned to my tailor's ham cooling off from being steamed like mad.

Next up are the sleeves and then the lining!!