Materials, Better Pictures

So here is the ridiculous pile of materials I have, plus patterns that may or may not be helpful in designing my dress's various components. Left third is my dress, right top third is his suit materials, lower right third is my stays base coutil and top fabric.

Here's his suit materials, linen lining and silk top fabric in a pile against a mass-market paperback for comparison. This isn't including his shirt fabric, which I haven't bought yet. I just need white cotton for that, no reason to buy it before I'm ready to sew it.

Here's a closer picture of my fabrics and patterns, since his were showcased a bit better in the original image I put up. The periwinkle is the petticoat, and the dark blue the over dress and bodice. Much darker than what Stanzie had--hers was periwinkle, and a light blue underskirt--but this will look better against my skin (I always look better in deep, rich colors, jewel tones I think is the term, than pastels).

And here's my fabric piled against the same book, stood upright, for comparison. Again silk, with some linen for lining (bodice and top skirt) and some cotton (petticoat).

And finally a close-up of the dupioni silk for my stays so you can see how lustrous and red it is. It actually lookes a little darker in person, almost more of a maroon (as you can see in the pictures above), but in a camera flash it renders more of a true ruby color.

So there it is. What I'm working with. Even if the sewing sucks I'm at least not going to look like a polyester Pollyanna, eh?

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!

On Materials and Mood Fabrics

I'm not sure if it's a universal piece of advice, but from everything that I've seen on websites about sewing and from everything I've heard from people I know who do it, the cardinal rule for beginners seems to be "don't choose a project that's too hard for your skill set." Basically the opposite of my intentions with this costume project, which is clearly Go Big Or Go Home.

I am essentially a novice at sewing. My godmother used to sew, and I helped her make me a Renaissance Fair dress one fall when I was in high school--by help I mean I cut the pieces and did the hand-finishing, and watched her do the machine sewing--but that's as close as I've ever been to a project of this scope. I can re-attach buttons in a way that they aren't coming off even in a knife-fight, and I have hand-hemmed pants that I decided to make into capris, and mended rips in a shirt. And that's actually been it for me for sewing. But I have always wanted to have the skills and equipment to make fabulous outfits for Occasions, so this wedding project is just an impetus to jumpstart this idealized passion into an actual hobby. Also, I watch a lot of Project Runway, and if those people have learned how to sew and design, there's no way I can't, as well. I am a smart girl, and not entirely tactiley helpless. I understand there will be a learning curve, but I also believe I have enough tenacity, exposure if not experience, and common sense to make it through with an outcome I am proud of.

One thing I am hell-bent on is making sure that, beginner or not, these costumes look nice. By that, I suppose I mean luxe. The one costume wedding I've witnessed had a dress that, while lovely, looked, well, like polyester. (You're looking at the lady in red on the right. She was the bride--we just happened to be outside the bar when their pirate wedding, complete with Naval chaplain and crossed-sword salute, sprung up around us. I daresay watching this charming and casual proceeding may have planted the germ of our own wedding theme two years ago.)

I don't want to look like I'm in a modern fabric aping (poorly) the finery of yesteryear. These are both our wedding clothes and costumes that we intend to use for years; we want them to be right. So it was frustrating to me to go to the local fabric stores and come up empty-handed because they had nothing like what I was looking for, and realize that I would have to go elsewhere for my needs. Which seems impossible in a city like New Orleans, that there is not a great fabric store here. Note: There is an upscale fabric shop I have not visited, mostly because their prices are high and I had an opportunity to go to New York. I will at some point check them out and see whether they are worth frequenting for later projects/emergency replacements.

So instead of buying cheap fabric, going on the internet and buying what I could only hope were the right colors and fabric weights, or getting gouged for it, I went--as I mentioned--to The City (as all the people I met in Jersey, where I was staying, kept calling it) and, like any good PR junkie, went to Mood Fabrics.

That was a fabulous experience! The building was hilariously obscure--all it had was the address, no sign that it was a business building as opposed to apartments, nothing on the wall outside; obviously the building shot on the show is from the LA location! If you didn't know it was there, like if you just went to the Garment District and thought you could stumble onto it, you can't. Plenty of other stores, yes, and next time I go to NYC and have a couple hours to kill maybe I'll explore some of the many, many other fabric stores I passed. But Mood? You have to know it's there. Since I had the address, I walked right in and only stopped to verify with the business sign discreetly on the wall that I was in the right place before ringing for the elevator. The elevator man (WTF, right? EXACTLY) took me right to the third floor, and the staff on the floor left me alone until I had stopped wandering from section to section and started pulling out fabrics to compare. The man who cut for me was extremely helpful; he helped me to find several color options I hadn't seen, and I'm pretty sure gave me a price break on one of the fabrics because he didn't have the $18 silk (only the $30) in the color I needed, but yet $18 was the highest per-yard cost I had when my purchase was rung up.

And going in to a store like that was the best move I could have made, to wait and consider the colors in person (vs. buying on the internet), because being able to hold the prospective colors for jacket against waistcoat against pants settled me on them.

There are six fabrics there, and the gold and the two purples (on the right) go together, while the white and the periwinkle and the dark violet that you really can't see in this light go together. Interestingly, the two trim fabrics (the gold brocade and the white) were actually the first pieces I picked out. Perhaps they had to be, or perhaps they were simply the easiest two to choose because they were the most specific and therefore had the fewest choices. I will say this about Mood, it was nearly overwhelming for me as a consumer. There were just so many choices, and I am not sure I could have chosen well without having those two pieces to start from. I also honestly didn't know the second thing about what I needed. I had tried to research fabric weights and types, but it wasn't that clear when I was looking at the rolls of fabric and trying to decide. In the end I think I did well, certainly for my experience level and definitely within budget (under my upper limit, at that!), but it was nerve-wracking. And wonderfully exciting. It made the whole undertaking start to seem real.

For those of you following along for a sewing project perspective, I wish I could tell you what I actually bought, but I don't think these silks were specifically labeled--the four main ones came from the same section, and it was unmarked. I know they weren't Georgette, or charmeuse, or duchess satin, or watered silk, because those were labeled. The white is a cotton/silk blend and very filmy. The brocade is a brocade. The others are all slinky and thin. Probably too thin, but Mood didn't have thick silks there. Perhaps heavy silks don't exist anymore (since getting back from this trip, I've seen historical recreation websites complaining about the lack of historical-type silks so I feel less like an idiot for getting fabrics that are too thin). I will have to compensate by lining with stiff fabric or even using lining and interlining to stiffen them so they hold a shape, especially for his coat and maybe also my bodice and the top skirt. The pants and my petticoat, I think, will be fine simply with a lining.

I will take a picture of all my materials at some point, because it's quite funny to see how much fabric I have bought for this project. Maybe overbought, but I figured that would be better than the alternative! Since the Mood expedition, I have also bought locally material for my chemise, his shirt and stock, the linings and/or interlinings, and my stays (okay, actually most of their materials are internet purchases, except that I did find a beautiful duiponi silk at Hancock's fabrics that I am covering them with). But since the finishing fabrics have the most glamour, I wanted to show off what I'm working with (ultimately) before I start posting pictures of my chemise and stays--the only parts I've actually started.

And in the meantime, this is the best encapsulation of "What I did in New York":