Fixing Fuckups

Wonder of wonders the major sewing is finished. Now I get to do what all conscientious craftsmyn do, fix my fuckups.
Everybody fucks up. The mark of spiritual maturity is how much honest energy you put into fixing those fuckups, and how cheerfully you address the issue.
After finishing the canvas work and laying the finished product out in the hall for measurements I immediately took the thing down to the laundry room here at Williams Plaza and ran the new sail through a hot wash with Arm & Hammer detergent and an hour in a hot dryer.

After an hour on the ironing board in the panic of near despair, I finally got it took look halfway like it should have all along. The way I laid out the reefing band is probably going to prove to be a world-class fuckup, and I did it that way out of sheer vanity, knowing full well where that shit usually gets me.

I need to get the sizing out of the cloth so it will take the tannin uniformly, and I figured I had better get the inevitable shrinkage out of the way before I stitch on the bolt-rope and work in the grommets and cringles.
There's a fuck of a lot of sizing in brand new canvas. One washing by this front loader machine got maybe half of it out. The last time I had new sheets it took three to make them actually feel like clean cotton sheets and not like crumpled aluminum foil.
So I wasn't really surprised when I opened up the dryer and found an ugly crumpled mass still obviously half-full of sizing. I will definitely need to repeat the washing, and maybe again after that. I won't run it through the dryer again. I will try wet-ironing it instead.
As it was I had to iron the shit out of everything with the iron as hot as it would go and a squirt bottle of water in one hand, which made the thing look more or less like it is supposed to. Even the corner patches, six layers thick in places, were like dried seaweed.
So I laid it out in the hall and measured. The cloth shrank like a bastard in length, 111 to start and 98 after, 10 % along the leach. The width at the foot only lost 3 inches,  around 3 % somewhere,

That's the belly band running at the diagonal there, wrinkly as shit and totally interrupting the shape of the cloth. Major malfuntion, which in my infinite vanity I believed wouldn't happen, wouldn't matter if it did, and that I can fix it. Denial. Shit.

  The worst thing is the reef band across the belly 30 inches up. I had a continuous strip that was the full LENGTH of the cloth which I ran the WIDTH of the sail which totally fucked things up.. I should have known, it shrank way more than the cloth under it. Oops. I'l have to pick it off and re-stitch it. It's shrunk now, so I might as well use it.
Then comes all the fun stuff like roping and eyelets and grommets and the finish work where I can show off all my sailor-Jack bullshit.
Tomorrow is my 65th birthday.