As promised, here is my how-to on making a late-1860s covered cage ( Read more... )

I took my camera outside with me today and got pictures of my corset and hoop! (Also, apparently I'm really bad at outdoor photography and have lots of weird shadows.) Here they are:

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I just need to close up the bottom hoop casing and fix a tiny bit somewhere else where I ripped out a couple stitches and this hoop will be done! A couple of quick photos taken today. Before and after adding the steels:

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I now have all the hoopsteel casings attached to the hoop. They're 1 inch cotton twill tape. The hoop has been assembled as well as a bumpad to support the back. I tried on the skirt and it seems to have a good elliptical shape even before adding the steel. What's left: waistband, steels, finishing bits. I plan on doing a whole write-up of how I ( Read more... )

ashamanja_babu says pictures. So I took a quick pic of the finished corset with the binding, lace (from Treadle!), and flossing. After I'd already sewn on the lace with the binding, I realized it would have been more accurate to add the lace over top of the binding and facing pointy edge up. But by that point it was already on and I wasn't redoing it. Oh well. ; ( Read more... )

I bit the bullet yesterday evening and flossed my corset. Just simple Xs on the bottoms of the bones and not even that neat, but done. atherleisure was totally right when she said that if I didn't do it know, I probably wouldn't go back to it later. Plus, I was rather sick yesterday (I've had the cold from hell for the past few months that will just never ( Read more... )

I finally finished binding my corset. I don't know if I'll end up flossing it. At this point, I'm just tired of working on it and want to move on to something else. Flossing would probably be good, but I'm not sure that it's necessary. I'll have to try wearing the corset more and seeing if the bones have any inclination to twist or move around. If ( Read more... )

With my new corset! It's not as pretty as my lavender satin one, but the fit is much better. The waist is in the right place and the bust and hips have the right amount of room so that I have an almost perfectly even lacing gap. And, when I laced it up normally, I got half an inch more reduction than in the lavender corset! It's so comfortable too ( Read more... )

So here's the corset with all the external boning channels added. The second channel from the front that runs over the bust is just for looks. I can't put boning in there because that is where my ribs stick out on my left side. (Ribcages are weird.) But the rest will have boning in them. I'm using skinny cable ties because they are flexible and ( Read more... )

So, nothing would take out those marks. BUT I came up with a solution that should hide most of them fairly well. I needed to add boning channels and was going to make them internal channels, but now they are going to be external channels instead. The marks are in the middle of each panel, right where the channels will go. A few won't have channels ( Read more... )