Boning

I wonder even as I type that title whether I’m about to get hits from people think this is that kind of website, lol!

If that’s why you’re here, sorry, I’m talking about the boning that goes into corsets. And stays, which is what I'm actually making, for those of you who are here for that. Despite stays usually being described as "18th century corsets," they aren’t quite the same thing and thus require different considerations for their boning…as I have learned the hard way. I will try to encapsulate my research and decision-making journey for you, to cover all the points without belaboring any of them.

Stays, as I said above, are not like corsets, in that they are not shaping the body the same way. As I understand it, stays are mainly about creating a slimmer front waist—which makes the side view thicker—and creating the “apples on a tray” look for the bosom. They should not obstruct breathing or press any internal organs around. This is because they are a rigid cast without much bend, designed to move the body in essentially one direction (back) instead of two (back and down). The Victorian corsets are made to conform to a woman’s curves and compress all of them, in every direction. They’re the ones that deserve the bad rap for health reasons, and they’re the ones that can be laced to interfere with breathing.

The distinction of design and purpose becomes important when you consider what kind of boning to use. For a Victorian style corset, you need boning that is more flexible and adaptable to the curvature of the body. For stays, to a large extent that seems to defeat the point, since it’s not supposed to be flexible but a rigid garment. Let me also explain that there are two ways to make stays: fully boned, or half-boned. Fully boned stays are literally stays that have boning sewn into channels that cover pretty much every inch of their surface area.





Half-boned stays actually range from half-boned to two-thirds-boned, but they have some space between the boning channels.


I am planning to make half-boned, because they seem easier to make—3-piece pattern vs. 5, and significantly fewer boning channels to sew. (Let’s hope I don’t make them and decide I should have gone for fully boned and have to start over!)

The easy part was choosing the fabric—basically, every site I found about stays/corset-making agreed that coutil cotton is the best for the base layers, and I let chance and opportunity decide my cover layer of ruby dupioni silk. I’m going to trim it with black satin on the edging, but I’m still debating whether and how to decorate the top layer of fabric.

The hard part has been the boning. Plastic or steel boning is preferred for stays—not spiral steel which might be acceptable or even preferred for the side boning in Victorian corsets—and is sold in ¼ and ½ inch widths in the United States. My conundrum has been whether to use plastic or steel or a mix, and which width.

I finally settled on a mix of steel and plastic because while I’m not “the most generously endowed or queen-sized” of figures that require all steel, I’m also not quite the “slim-figured” that can get away with only plastic in a half-boned version. (I think fully boned all plastic would work for me.)

Then I had a hell of a time trying to decide if I wanted to buy pre-cut and pre-tipped steel boning, or buy a length of steel and cut my own pieces as I needed them. The drawback of the pre-cut lengths was that I would have to know in advance what lengths I would need, and given that I’m not working off a hard-and-fast pattern, the lengths are going to be somewhat…nebulous until I'm actually sewing the boning in. The problem with cutting my own steel is that it would mean having to also buy steel cutters of some stripe and having to tip my own custom cuts, because raw-edged steel could too easily wear through the fabric. In the end I decided I’d rather spend an extra $10 buying all the sizes around what I think I’ll need in pre-cut lengths, to be sure I get the right length in there somewhere, rather than investing $30-50 in the tools when I may never build another corset again.

The final decision I had to make in terms of materials was what width to buy for a mixed-boning half-boned pair of stays. I had ¼ inch recommended from someone who makes corsets (that is, Victorian corsets) because the ½ inch is “really stiff and inflexible,” and the ¼ inch recommended from someone who has made fully boned stays. The website I’m drawing my pattern from recommends “10 mm,” which if you know anything about metric conversions is right smack in the middle of ¼ and ½ inch. So, I decided to buy ¼ inch because that was 2 recommendations for it. It arrived two days ago, and I took one look at it and went back to the website to order some ½ inch steels, as well.

What was the problem?

Well, essentially, ¼ inch is really damn thin. I had ordered about 50 pieces all told (I’ve seen fully boned stays that had 100-120 bones, and by yard-lengths I was in the right range of 10-12 yards for half-boned stays), 36 in plastic and about 25 in steel. I was thinking that would be enough, but looking at it…there was no way that 12.5 inches of boning (1/4 inch width per piece x 50 pieces laid out side-by-side) were going to properly mash my body. That’s about a third of my actual circumference (maybe a bit more, but not by a “statistically significant” amount), and one-third-boned stays just aren’t going to cut it. Consider that the same number of ½ inch bones would be 25 inches—or 2/3 of my circumference. Yeah.

So I immediately ordered the same number of steel bones, in the same lengths as the first set, except twice as wide. Note to anyone out there thinking of making a corset or stays: overbuy your boning the first time! Shipping was not any cheaper for my rinky-dink purchase than it was for my boning plus tape plus cording plus hoop boning, so I am kicking myself for wasting that $10 shipping charge when if I’d been properly paranoid in the first place, I could have just bought the same lengths of ½ inch steels to be safe and had everything I needed in one go.

As to how I’m planning to utilize my materials: I figure I will put the ½ inch boning in the front “busk” and the middle back, which are the parts most in need of a good firm bone structure. Then I’ll use the ½ inch pieces where I can in the side channels, and either flank each piece of ½ inch boning with a piece of ¼ inch to the sides, or intersperse the thinner bones into the space between the wider bones. If my steel cuts aren’t long enough for some of the channels, I can always do two or three ¼ inch bones sewn right next to each other like they are in fully-boned stays and create the equivalent of a wider bone with the smaller ones.

Maybe I’m not giving the thinner boning enough credit here, but it just seemed so narrow and unlikely to make a dent in my statuesque frame. And if I end up with some crazy pastiche of boning, well, if it’s doing the job I need it to do, I frankly don’t care. My aim, as I’ve said before, is not historical recreation but historical suggestion. As long as it gives my body the proper silhouette, I don’t really care how anachronistic the piece itself is!

I’m intending to keep very detailed construction notes on the stays. I know I haven’t gotten up anything about my chemise yet—working on that! Just got a new camera and haven’t loaded the picture software to my computer yet—but needless to say I didn’t finish it before my boning arrived. Revised deadline: before the second package of boning arrives!