I spent the day mostly at my desk, working on the next gallery page for my site. The house was quiet, the men are away skiing in Vermont, and my daughter spent the day working in a kennel. She loves the dogs, and caring for them, and always comes home quite in need of a shower! I drove her tonight to her friend’s house in a neighboring county, where she will spend the night.
So I’m alone tonight, and after I finished fine tuning the collar/facing piece, and getting it and the hem all basted in, I spent some time couching the lime green floss around the collar/facing edges. This is a bit tricky, I loosened the tension on the upper thread, and loosened the tension on the presser foot, which helped keep the couching from compressing and skewing the collar as I sewed around it. I had to first pre-thread the floss using a tapestry needle, up the front, through the
underside of the collar at the start of the fold line, since couching is one sided, around the collar, and back through to the underside of the collar, continuing down the other front. That way when I put the special cording foot on the machine, I could break the zig zag stitching when I had to switch sides, but not the floss.
I took my hand sewing kit, and curled up in front of a pre-recorded episode of PBS’s Great 
Performances, King Lear starring Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Obviously it was an unbelievable performance, and I was able to get all the hand sewing finished, the hem, the facings, and the backs of the buttonholes. The sleeves are next.