95th Rifles Uniform: Panic At The Disco

One of those is my right brain, one's my left brain.  I leave it to you to determine which is which

This week, October started.  That means I'm down to T-30 days, and shit be gettin' real, as the kids say; and as of bedtime Monday I still had not put scissors to a single piece of fashion fabric.  Monday evening was slated for admin tasks: go through fabric swatches that had arrived in the mail, work out what bones I really needed for the corset (the ones calculated by the pattern size were unsurprisingly too long, since I am short and squat), order the 65 buttons to sew on the uniform coatee, etc.  However, what actually happened is that I fell down a rabbit hole of Too Much Information, which was both a) very helpful and b) incredibly daunting.

Because Sharpe's coat didn't have ENOUGH
buttons.  D:

Said rabbit hole was a forum for the 2/95th Rifles re-enactors in Britain, who (like most military re-enactors) are some pretty serious cats.  Specifically it was a thread in which one of their chief tailors set out on a commission to make a full outfit for a new officer recruit; he continued to blog his progress via thread updates, culminating in photos of the finished product (which looked pretty darn amazing, at that).  If you are curious, you can check out the thread here, but for the TL;DR contingent, let me just sum up by saying the project took him about six months.  six.  SIX.  In vain did I console myself that it wasn't the only project he was working on; in vain did I reason that he was making the entire outfit, not just coatee and trousers.  All I could hear was SIX MONTHS.  Though, on the bright side, the thread also supplied me with some details and descriptions of both the only surviving officer's coat of the era (which is in the Royal Green Jackets museum, but not pictured anywhere on their website, grr) and some other details they had painstakingly exacted from other primary sources.   Long story short, here are my takeaways, as they used to say in meetings:

- Sharpe's trim is soutache (or Russia braid).  The originals used silk twisted cord. Soutache being thicker, that's probably why they just made Sharpe's buttonholes as loops made out of the trim, rather than for-realsies buttonholes.  I'm having an impossible time finding wide enough soutache (usually what you see is 1/4" or smaller), and also soutache is harder to sew. On the other hand, since the cord is narrower, they fit a lot more buttons.
RESULT: I will use twisted cord, but space it all out more like Sharpe's.  Might use wider cord, too.

- The odd three-tab bottom on the back of Sharpe's coat is a misunderstanding of the vestigial cornered tails on the back of the original. 
RESULT: I will make the pointed tails like in the original, which will also avoid the "I can see your shirt peeking out" problem.

This is Walter Clarke's actual jacket.
Note the bottom center.

see the tabs there?  Someone didn't grok what he
was looking at.

- There's still something weird going on with the cuffs between this one and Sharpe's.  They look the same, but somehow the buttons come out different?  
RESULT: handwave the shit out of it.

- [Extended dither about fabric goes here.]
RESULT: use the excellent wool twill; and when I have the buttons in hand, give them a good heft, figure out if I'm going to need to interline, and do the job.

Anyways, all of these results are well and good now, when I've thought them through and come to decisions; but in the moment I went to bed with a teeming brain...and then woke up in the wee hours with my heart thundering as if it was going to burst out of me like a baby Alien.  Pulse up from my usual ~70 to a good 95 beats per minute. It took about an hour and a half to calm down and get back to sleep.

And then I was adrenalized, twitchy, and on edge during the day.

And then it happened again the next night; und so weiter.

I have, at the earnest representation of my friends, taken medical advice, and it would appear that this is some sort of anxiety or panic attack.  Just knowing that has helped somewhat; and I've taken more positive action, and I've written everything (!) up into a work breakdown structure, and I feel like the physical symptoms are in abeyance.  But I'm really torked about having to waste cycles on this.  OBEY, MEATSACK PARTS.

(In the words of one of my sewing circle: "Have you considered taking on projects with fewer bees in them, which will reduce your chances of becoming Covered in Bees?")