One-sixteenth of an inch

Good thing I was too tired to sew those sleeves into the dress.  I ended up ripping them apart the next night. At least eleven times.  

I was having trouble getting the edges of the green band on the bottom of the sleeve to align at the seam.  They were only off a little bit -- one-sixteenth of an inch.  And no one would ever know, as the seam is under my arm.  But I would know.  And Dr. Simpson would know.  

I had asked her for tips on how to get the circumference of the sleeve hem that was turned under to match smoothly with the outer circumference of the sleeve, and she commented on the edges of the band not being lined up: "Your pattern probably didn't make a right angle there."

The bottom of a sleeve is just slightly curved, not a straight line, as the sides of the sleeve are tapered in toward the bottom.  I knew that when I had cut apart the pattern to add the band to the sleeve that I had copied in that curve.  I double-checked the pattern when I got home, and sure enough, the curve was there. However, for some reason I had not aligned the edges of the green and blue fabric exactly and had just sewn them straight across.  So I ripped off the band and sewed it back together, carefully, along the curve.  

The edges still didn't match -- they were off by one-sixteenth of an inch, and looked worse than before.  Now they made a bit of a vee and came to a point, to boot.  I ripped again, and carefully aligned, and stitched again.  Still off.  I carefully rolled the folded edge of the band along its mate on the other side and pinned it together.  Still off.  Rip!  I pin-stitched exactly along the stitching line.  No match.  Rip!  I basted it by hand.  No go.  Rip!  After about the fifth time, I got smart and finally sewed it together with a basting stitch, which made ripping a little bit faster.  

I finally thought carefully about what Dr. Simpson had said, that it wasn't making a right angle and I needed to adjust the pattern/stitching line.  Since there was a little too much green compared to the blue, I ripped apart to seam attaching the band to the bottom of the sleeve and misaligned the edges, taking out just one-sixteenth of an inch of the green.  I sewed it all back together.  It was much better, but I determined I needed to do the same thing on the other side of the sleeve. Rip!  Finally, I had a perfect match with 90-degree seams!  

Well, it's not really perfect -- now it's only off by one-thirty-secondth  of an inch.  But I'll just put in a small picture here and you'll never be able to tell.  Then I just had to do the same thing to the second sleeve.  I only ripped it out once. After I decided it was good enough and sewed over the basting stitch (double-rip!).  Hey, and all that ripping and re-sewing of the 7" seam only took me an hour and a half.