Today I made a mockup!
This is a big deal for me, normally I put my trust in my calculations and piece in fabric if I need to. So after taking Owen (younger brother) to his dentist appointment and getting a bagel lunch at Panera, I went home and started cutting out the pieces for the 1911 corset from these large jeans I bought at Salvation Army ages ago. It looked like I was going to run out of fabric, but I just squeaked by and finished off the jeans as well - always good to get something out of the stash! Although I kind of want to replace them now just in case I need to do another corset mockup sometime soon.
I haven't quite finished with the mockup yet - I'm going to unpick the back seams from the 1901 corset I made quickly for my Victorian Romance Emma costume a few years ago and use those as the lacing strips, because I only have so many grommets/washers and I also only have so much patience. Just holding the mockup against me, though, is telling me that a) it definitely hits between underbust and mid-bust, I don't think I'll have to make a brassiere! and b) it's quite big, somehow. I don't know if it's because of my cutting out or because a one-inch seam allowance leaves me a lot of space to err. It's interesting, though, because the front six pieces seem to be the right size. The problem might be just in the back gussets and CB pieces. Also, the bottom is completely uneven - I added an inch to the bottom of each piece, thinking that the two inches recommended would probably be too much for me, so maybe I forgot to add it to some and added it poorly to others. These are all pretty minor things, though, so I am considering this a success! I'll post pictures when I put the lacing strips on.
After I was tired of all this sewing - and especially of pushing pins through denim - I decided to work on scaling up my stays pattern. I did it using the proportion method: find the bust and waist measurements of the original garment by drawing lines across the pattern pieces, find the percentage of the whole that each line segment takes up, find how long that segment would be for my measurements. I very rarely have to adjust the height of anything, and I decided after measuring the CF that I wouldn't have to here. As the original stays were home-made and simple, the pieces are quite geometric and I got them drawn on newspaper and cut out pretty fast. It looks like the front and back pieces might be a bit wide, somehow, but really there's nothing else for me to do but mope around until I feel I can allow myself to buy fabric. When I do, I promise to take looooads of pictures of my process.
I haven't quite finished with the mockup yet - I'm going to unpick the back seams from the 1901 corset I made quickly for my Victorian Romance Emma costume a few years ago and use those as the lacing strips, because I only have so many grommets/washers and I also only have so much patience. Just holding the mockup against me, though, is telling me that a) it definitely hits between underbust and mid-bust, I don't think I'll have to make a brassiere! and b) it's quite big, somehow. I don't know if it's because of my cutting out or because a one-inch seam allowance leaves me a lot of space to err. It's interesting, though, because the front six pieces seem to be the right size. The problem might be just in the back gussets and CB pieces. Also, the bottom is completely uneven - I added an inch to the bottom of each piece, thinking that the two inches recommended would probably be too much for me, so maybe I forgot to add it to some and added it poorly to others. These are all pretty minor things, though, so I am considering this a success! I'll post pictures when I put the lacing strips on.
After I was tired of all this sewing - and especially of pushing pins through denim - I decided to work on scaling up my stays pattern. I did it using the proportion method: find the bust and waist measurements of the original garment by drawing lines across the pattern pieces, find the percentage of the whole that each line segment takes up, find how long that segment would be for my measurements. I very rarely have to adjust the height of anything, and I decided after measuring the CF that I wouldn't have to here. As the original stays were home-made and simple, the pieces are quite geometric and I got them drawn on newspaper and cut out pretty fast. It looks like the front and back pieces might be a bit wide, somehow, but really there's nothing else for me to do but mope around until I feel I can allow myself to buy fabric. When I do, I promise to take looooads of pictures of my process.
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