Cotton Bobbinet Corselette

Instead of using a coutil or tightly woven cotton like ticking, I decided to use cotton netting for my corselette.

I found a source of cotton bobbinet at Dharma Trading Co. a couple of years ago.  The first length I purchased in store was rather stiff before laundering.  

The item was out of stock for a while, and when it reappeared on the website, I ordered more.  This time around, the netting was quite soft and had a lot more drape, even without the benefit of washing.

Like so many textiles from Dharma, the color choice is limited to white.  So my first item of business was to dye a portion of my yardage.  I chose two different fiber reactive dyes, hoping that a combination of Ivory and Powder Pink would do a decent job of matching my skin tone.  It is not perfect, but I got pretty lucky, and am very pleased with how the color came out.

And then it was time to rip apart one half of my muslin for the pattern pieces.

To make cutting easier, I decided to trim my muslin pieces down, leaving an even 1/2” margin outside of the marked stitching line.

For the bust cups, I used a 1/4” seam allowance.

Two sets of pieces were cut, one on grain, and one on the cross grain, which were then layered together.  

This was a rather tedious process, as many of the pieces are similar in shape and the netting has no obvious right or wrong side.

The two layers were then basted together (by machine - I decided hand basting was probably not the best choice for this textile!) and finally stitched together.

Next was the actual garment construction.

The 1/2" seams were trimmed slightly before being pressed flat.

For boning channels, I cut bias strips of cotton and applied one to each seamline.

And it finally started looking like a corselette!

I am not sure if I will be using an underwire, but I added a casing to that seamline just in case.

I did not think that stitching a bunch of hook & eyes to netting was going to be much fun, so I used the cotton to bind the front edges and do double duty as a boning channel.

From this point on, the construction is a bit of an experiment.

I feel like I am headed in the right direction, but only time will tell!

And so far, this is what I have come up with.

Not too shabby for a weekend's worth of sewing!

An Old Muslin Comes in Handy

Last year I decided to make up Simplicity 1183 in a printed cotton. 

I got as far as marking the seam allowances on the tissue pattern . . .

thread tracing my muslin pieces . . .

and stitching them together.

Of course, time got away from me, and after the warm weather disappeared, the muslin was put into a bag and set aside.  This project got lucky and did not get forgotten for very long.  Because I thought it might work well for a corselette, I pulled that muslin out.  It needed a long-waist adjustment, as well as a bit of a sway back adjustment.

In order to make fitting easier, I used a few pieces of boning, temporarily held in place with the help of some masking tape.  This makes a real difference when working with such a close fitting garment without straps.

Not surprisingly, this corset is not very curvy as drafted.  It is what I would call a fashion corset - its looks cute, but does not function as a real body shaper.  So the first thing I did was take in the waist portion of all the pieces slightly.  Of course, if you constrict the waist, the extra fluff has to go somewhere, so I added gussets to increase the hip measurement.  

I also have extended the back pieces above the shoulder blades (when I know exactly where the dress neckline is going to sit, that may have to be adjusted.

I started with the C-cup pattern pieces, but as drafted, they are very low-cut.  I also extended that line for more coverage.  But again, when I finalize the dress design, some of that excess may come back off.

For this project, I made a significant number of changes that were somewhat challenging to keep track of on my muslin, so I made a second version to make sure I was happy with the fit and so I have a clean pattern to work from.

For this corselette, I am going to try something a bit different, and have it open at the front.  I am anticipating that I will use hook & eyes as a closure.

And that is the beginning of the foundation for my Rose de France dress! 

A Ruffled Petticoat

I purchased a black tea length petticoat a few years ago for this dress.  It has come in handy, let me tell you!  But for this gown, I wanted something extra to help fill out the back half of the skirt and all of those pleats.  An added bonus would be to keep all of that itchy nylon netting away from my skin!

To accomplish this, I added a cotton petticoat to the corselette.

I cut two of the front skirt pattern pieces to use as a petticoat.  To create a center back opening, I made a simple fabric placket that could be stitched to the zipper opening of the corselette.

Basically, the corselette/petticoat you see here goes on first, the purchased petticoat sits on top of that, which is finally topped with the dress!

The waistline of the petticoat was finished with rayon seam binding and then hand stitched to the corselette.

The upper edge of the corselette was finished with the cherry print fabric just in case the top edge ever becomes visible along the neckline.

But first, that neckline had to be evened out.

A contrasting color of basting stitches helped keep track of the new upper edge line, which was trimmed.

The bias binding was then stitched on by hand.

Which makes it really easy to control.

And I love handwork!

The ruffles for the petticoat were made from netting.

The netting is 72” wide, so I just used that as my width.  Each ruffle was cut twice as deep as needed, plus one or two inches for a seam allowance and to account for folding all that bulk over on itself.

The netting was folded in half, basted together, and gathered using that basting stitch (I prefer a folded bottom edge to a raw edge – it looks nicer and poofs more than a single layer).

The gathered ruffle was stitched to the cotton petticoat, facing toward the waistline.  I chalked the stitching line to make it easy to see.

Since this is an underlayer, marking things up is not a problem.

The ruffle then was folded into its proper position, facing downward toward the hemline.  Normally, that would be it.  But since these ruffles were a bit narrow, they did not want to stay down.  To remedy this, I top-stitched right next to the stitching line.

I was hoping to add one more large ruffle from the bottom of the zipper opening to the hemline, but ran out of time.  In the end, I think the silhouette worked just fine without.  

And considering the actual dress was unwearable three days before the event, it was a concession I was willing to make.  Shortcuts had to be made somewhere!

Horsehair braid was added to the hemline of the cotton petticoat for an extra bit of oomph.

Here is the completed look.  It does not fit my dress form since I have squishy bits to displace, and the form is quite solid.  So here I am in my underwear.

Best of all, the two pieces (corselette and petticoat) are easily separated since they are hand-stitched together.  This means that I can use them again, together or separate, as the need arises.