Mocking Myself

 Greetings, fellow humans!

 Welcome to my blog. Thank you for joining this magical mystery tour.

 So I've already written this post once and for some reason it vanished into the ethernet when I uploaded it. My best guess is that it's penance for my outburst at JoAnn fabrics the other night. 

But I'm kind of burned out on talking about this failure on my part so here's an abridged version of what went down this past week and a half. 

 My original timeline for this project had me ideally finishing the corset by the first week of school at the latest. That was really cute of June Rachel to do to August/September Rachel. Because I have been in a sewing hole for two weeks and the mock-up is still incomplete. After trying it on, I question my very ability to sew. 

 I can't believe I've done this. But the entire concept of adding seam allowances and the importance of uniformity in doing so escaped my mind completely when I cut out the pattern pieces by eye. This is the sewing equivalent of forgetting how to drive. Or how to spell your own name. The only logical explanation is the terrible coffee coursing through my veins at the time. (Apple crisp macchiato. Don't do it.) It made me feel too powerful. And it tasted like soap. 

This is basic sewing knowledge. Commercial patterns typically have seam allowances factored into the equation already. Seam allowances allow a little extra room for the raw edge of the fabric to be finished and neatly pressed down on the "wrong" side so the material doesn't unravel over time. Pattern companies really try to make things easy for makers to just follow the guides on their sewing machines and do the standard 5/8 inch gap so every piece is proportioned correctly. 

Here's what my clown self did instead of measuring an equal distance around the pattern pieces and then cutting it out like a normal person. I cut out everything relying on my eyes and the background noises of several 9/11 documentaries floating upstairs from the family room to guide me. 

 I also underestimated how much cording I needed by about sixty yards. That became apparent when I ran out of it before reaching the halfway point of the mock-up. The post titled Je Suis Une Emergence goes into that spinoff adventure where I make an enemy of the JoAnn cut counter attendant. (The cording is now returned if anyone happened to read that weird story. And if you did, we're not talking about it.) 

 Forgive whatever quality this image turns out to be. But do you see how many little ridges there are in the hip bands alone? Each line is a cord. And it may not look like it, but to finish the whole thing as pictured here, my rough estimation puts the amount of cording needed at around ninety yards. Anyway, I went about adding cording and boning roughly where the original Salen pattern instructed me to. The bones and/or the cords were sandwiched between two layers of muslin and pushed against a straight line of stitching and then another line was stitched on the opposite side. Here's a video because I feel like that explanation doesn't make a ton of sense: 

 I did that for as much of the corset as possible. Of course, I only used bones towards the end because I had to ask my department to buy more cording I found online. If Ashley is reading this, I freaking love you!

 No whales were/will be harmed in the making of this corset. I'm using acrylic boning instead.

 I also tried sewing in the busk. Busks are a straight piece of wood or metal that goes in the center front of a corset or stays to add support. Victorians figured out a way to split their metal busks down the center and made little tabs that hooked to pegs on the other side so that lacing and unlacing their corsets was no longer a daily task. Also undressing is a whole lot simpler. If you have any experience with bras that hook in the front, it’s sort of similar. The Victorians also changed the shape to fit the ever-evolving silhouettes. So mine is a reproduction split steel spoon busk which has more of an S-shaped curve. 

 I stabbed holes for the peg side with a pencil. Which was just a pro move on my part. For the tab side, the pins marked where I needed to stop stitching as well as where to pick it up again.

 A bit of technical stuff.

 I'll keep it brief. After haphazardly sewing in boning and what I had of the cording, I ran into issues with the stitch length. My sewing machine was a trooper here because I decided to do the obnoxious historical thing by making the stitch length super tiny. Because of course, I did.

 In my studies of extant garments, there is a noticeably smaller stitch length in Victorian and Edwardian articles of clothing. My guesses are that it was for strength though, it may not have been possible to change the stitch length on older machines. (I’m not a sewing machine doctor so take that tidbit with the largest grain of salt.) 

 I will probably shorten the stitches again just a tad on the final corset. But doing this on the mock-up proved a nightmare because I had to unpick most of my work by hand. And after my genetic predisposition to develop carpal tunnel syndrome emerged, I changed the length from the impossibly tiny 1 mm stitch back to a 2.5 mm stitch. Because again, I was having a weird relationship with seam allowances and logic. 

 The Mock-up Mock-up

 The whole fitting problem was exacerbated when I tried putting all sixteen pieces together, each with completely different maths. Part of me wants no one to see these photos but I feel it’s important to stress that this is part of the process.

 This is a person born in the nineties trying to revive something from over a hundred years ago out of curiosity. This is a human who has never made a corset in her life and is so excited to be given the chance by her university. And this is a person with significantly smaller boobs than this mock-up allows for!

I'm holding a seam with gaps in the stitching because I'm a wreck.

I didn't even put the hip bands in because it's so incorrect. And there are a lot of little things I'm going to play with. I will have to start over because of the seam allowance drama. And I'm honestly fine with it because I desperately want to get this right. The last of my materials will be coming in the mail soon and that's encouraging! There are some tools that will make my life a lot easier. I'm just a bit frustrated in my own oversight of the impending disaster on the first attempt.

Thanks so much for your interest in this project! Until next time,

 -Rachel