I unknowingly heat set my erasable/fast-fade fabric marker. So now there are faint marks left on the front of the corset panels where I numbered them. I tried washing them out, using Shout on them, and using lemon juice. No luck. Tomorrow I'm trying white vinegar. SO annoying. I got the other half of the corset assembled and the busk put in, but am ( Read more... )

Unfortunately my outing tomorrow is cancelled due to weather. They're predicting thunderstorms all day. Boo ( Read more... )

I kind of just want to make hats now. They're so much fun! Here's my "finished" hat, trimmed with flowers. I arranged them around the crown and pinned them, then I sewed them on with big stitches so that they'll be easily removeable. They're a bunch of the flowers that I used for my 1882 Little Mermaid evening gown repurposed. Yay for not having to ( Read more... )

Since I didn't get any sort of sewing done so far this month and have an outing this Saturday with Victorian at Heart, I made a new hat to add to my outfit. I used this Lynn McMaster's tutorial on altering modern straw hats. I took the crown off of my hat and dampened it to flatten the top. I also dampened and flattened the brim. I cut the brim and ( Read more... )

It took some really minor, miniscule changes to the bust to get this shape. Like seriously, we're talking 1/8" changes to the original pattern. Man corsets are weird. The wrinkles are still there, but they're much slighter and more evenly distributed and will definitely go away in the final product.

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The waist and hips are pretty good, I think. But my bust adjustments aren't quite right. It probably sounds crazy after all my gusset trauma, but I think bust gussets might give a better shape. However, while there are 1880s corset that have just bust gussets, the earlier styles of the sort that I'm trying to copy don't seem to have this and I ( Read more... )

Um so you may have noticed that my shawl still isn't done and is way late for the HSM Travel challenge. I am OK with this because, well, partly because I am easy-going about self-imposed deadlines, and partly because I have been working on this darn corset. Oh, and I had a cold. I cut myself a lot of slack when I am sick. But the shawl is still ( Read more... )

No pictures. I was too disgusted with this whole process. My latest mock-up with new back panels and gussets was somehow simultaneously better AND worse. I fixed the hip spring problem, but the very back gusset was all wonky. And then something was making the bust gussets sit too low, even though they were at the right height yesterday. I just don' ( Read more... )

Much better results on this one. Interestingly, I got a much better fit without using much boning. I mostly only have spring steel on hand instead of spiral, and when I had it in the corset I couldn't lace down and it was giving me pain. I have two thin cable ties over the bust and boning CF and CB and that's it. I'm still getting a lot of ( Read more... )

So this is the mock-up of the shaped panels. The fabric I'm using isn't quite heavy enough (cotton/poly sateen), nor do I have the right kind of boning on hand, flats instead of spirals. The next mock-up will be two layers and that should help some. Right now, it mostly looks just like the mock-up I did of the 1880s version of this corset, but ( Read more... )