On Thursday evening, a generous friend let me use a local maker space to set the grommets on Shoryl’s corset. (Our condo neighbors are deeply appreciative, even if they don’t know it.)
I knew this would be the most challenging piece of the costumes (we’ll see if that ends up being true) but I definitely didn’t expect it to take a month on its own. Some real life stuff crept in that kept me from sewing, but a lot of it was just researching things I’d never done before.
While I’ve made a handful of corsets, they were are 1) nearly 20 years ago, and 2) not modern corsets. Elizabethan corsets have a much different structure, construction, and purpose than Victorian and modern corsets, and that caused some bit of research. For example; I’d never worked with a latching busk.
It also can’t be discounted that my previous corsets were on a shoestring budget with what I could find at my local Jo-Ann’s and hardware stores. My most successful Elizabethan busk started life as a wooden yardstick that I cut down and hand shaped with sandpaper.
It’s not perfect, but it’s good – good for what it needed to do, most importantly, but good in construction technique (duct tape boning caps notwithstanding), and a good fit with no pokey bits. And Shoryl likes it, which is the most important part.
They’ll be wearing it under this shirt, purchased at DXL:
I knew I didn’t want to make a button down dress shirt from scratch (and having just demonstrated my lack of topstitching finesse on the corset, this was the correct decision), so we were thrilled to find this black damask shirt while doing unrelated shopping.
That said, it came with absolutely boring black and grey four-hole buttons. I swapped them out for something that matches better with the general opulence of the rest of the costume:
Next step: a double breasted waistcoat, which I am utterly thrilled to be making from an actual pattern.
Lessons learned:
- This cotton is far too loosely woven for a corset; it tended to fray a little when I was inserting the grommets and busk tabs
- Speaking of fraying, I am never, ever interlining something with cotton canvas again. I thought it would be fine. I was wrong. I’m going back to cotton duck
- Take out the basting before you sew over it if at all possible. If not possible, get a really good seam ripper and a ton of light
- The satin binding looks great, handles terribly
- Probably need to actually baste down the center of the grommet panel if I don’t want to spend a bunch of time complaining to my friends that I can’t keep my grommets vertically centered
- It’s going to take a lot of convincing to get me to use twill tape casings again instead of sandwiching my casings between the outer and the interlining like I usually do. So much work for so little reward
- Get a roll of spring steel next time. While I can cut down flat steel and, uh, tip it with duct tape, it wasn’t a pleasant experience in many different ways; don’t do that again, me
- I absolutely did not need 8 yards of lacing for this corset, but 5 yards seemed like not enough. It’s possibly worth it to be lacing by the yard and shrinkable aglets, but that seemed like Too Much for a one-off corset
A Twist of Metaphor 