Eyelet progress (a year later)

I'm working on Regency stays. I did not want to share the progress, because I had no idea whether the process was right or not (and did not want to baffle other beginner seamstresses with my unconventional method). Now it seems the process was right, more or less (although it's still possible that the cording will totally mess with it and it will turn out not to be right in the end). So I'll share a bit.

I'll share the eyelets I've made so far, because I've witnessed a strange phenomenon there.

A year ago, I made my first eyelet.


Not bad for a first eyelet, I thought, and then I had other things to do and the stays got stoved away and I didn't get back to them until a year later.

A year later, I made another eyelet.

Which looked like this:

So I went on and made two others. Which looked like this:

I wonder what happened in that year to account for picture-perfect eyelets. It certainly wasn't eyelet-making.