The collar was only the appetizer for the main course! The corset! I worked on the corset through the month of December and a little in to January. I am afraid I did not calculate the time worked on it, so I can't say how many hours exactly I worked on it. BUT! I worked on the corset pretty much every day: 30 minutes during my lunch break during the week, and an average of 6-8 hours on the weekends... plus many more powerhouse hours over my Christmas holiday. Each row of beads took about 30 minutes to apply... so you can do the math ^_^;
Progress..... I covered an existing corset I had with the same silk as the collar, then added a flap of fabric and some snaps to hide the front closures. The musical corsets appear to only have a back closure. Since I don't have a professional dresser to put me in my costume each time, I chose this method to make it easier to get on and off as required. I started with the front middle row, then added beads to each side for balance.

As you can see, towards the end, I was nearly out of beads... so you can see the lower spine area has a real mish-mash of beads. I figured it was safe since the back is almost entirely covered with the silk drape.
Some fun facts:

There are OVER 4600 beads to the collar and corset combined!

I watched 3 seasons of Community, 1 season of Life, 1 season of Numb3rs, 1 episode of Bones during the making of this corset

My cats are still finding stray beads that escaped a the corset and rolled away