Hooking the Eye or What Closure Do You Desire

I wanted to use buttons to close the bodice.  Ha…that wasn’t happening because of time constraints.  Even if I used the machine to make the buttonholes, I was looking at a couple of hours minimum to complete this task.  If I went with hook and eye tape, maybe an hour to complete.  Sold…..it had to be hook and eyetape.  Turns out I only had one section of hook and eye tape in the house which wasn’t being used and the tape was a nasty grey color.  Ugh….I bought this for a grey silk bodice but didn’t like it so didn’t use it.  Turned out to be the right call because this was some funky hook and eye tape.

But since beggars cant be choosers and the dreaded deadline fast approaches, the icky grey hook and eye tape it was.  The only other option is to steal from another bodice and the only one that was long enough looked like it was sewn on to survive a nuclear war, that thing was not coming off easy.

Now, hook and eye tape should be easy to put on.  Sew the hook tape on the edge and the eye tape about 3/4 in from the edge matching up the first hook and eye so that all the rest fall into place.  Easy peasy.  NOPE NOT THIS TIME.  Murphy’s law or whatever….The hook tape went on quickly.  Next while matching up the eyes, it looks good and I start sewing checking as I went along.  I am almost done and I notice that the eyes are no longer matching the hook placement….again WTF??? These tapes were purchased together and were meant to go together….so why was this not working? 

No time to figure it out…seriously, it is less than 5 hours until I have to be at the event and I have food to make, a shower to take and oh I don’t know drive to the event.  As I stare at the tape, I decide I will take little tucks on the eye tape until it matches again.  I had to do this on 2 consecutive eyes and then everything fell into line again…weird.  But it worked.  No time to sew on the fake buttons….but whatever, at least my bodice will close so I wont be flashing the world.

In the past, I have had some issues of the flap of the bodice flipping open and I was sure with all the weirdness with this hook and eye tape I would experience the same problem.  Not so!  Color me surprised, the hook and eye tape, for all its problems, worked perfectly with no flapping issues.