Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Phase I: The Corset

I am currently working on the corset. I am making this corset from Jill Salen's book "Corsets: Historical Patterns and Techniques".



I found a lovely tan silk embroidered with butterflies, dragonflies, and flies for the fashion fabric, and have white coutil for the strength layer. After measuring the pattern in the book, I figured it was pretty close to my measurements, so I scanned it to PDF and enlarged to 200%, then traced out and added 1/2" seam allowance. The mockup was a bit big on me, particularly in the under bust, but I am treating this as a single layer corset by fusing the silk to the coutil, so I went ahead and made it up. I took in the 1/2" seams to 5/8" instead, and it was still too large in the under bust, so I took in the top few inches of each seam a tad bit more, and now it fits. This was my first attempt at cording, and it came out decent. Not perfect, but okay for a first try.

Last night I fused more silk to some cotton duck and cut strips for the external boning channels, and cut bias strips for binding out of the silk only. I have the grommets inserted and the corset is ready for boning channels.

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