For once I'm doing this right and actually DOCUMENTING what the heck I'm doing so that I can remember for my next time through.
This is my third attempt at a bodice. My first was side lacing and made from corduroy with hand stitched eyelets. This is my "brownie" bodice, because the crinkly corduroy goes with the crinkly cotton chemise. Also, it's brown.
Bodice two is a front lacing bodice made from the tiniest little scrap of tapestry I found at fabric land for a buck. It seems all right at first, but the fit isn't perfect (it sort of rides up) and the edging is terrible and fray-tastic, and the front lacing is all- to use a technical term- wibbly. I put the gromets closer to the edge than the boning, and if I lace the bottom holes they just sort of curl up instead of lying flat.
So now it's bodice three. Huzzah.
If everything goes according to plan, this one will be reversable- red with stripes on the one side, yellow on the other, with a double layer of canvas inside. Oooooooooh.
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| From bodice 3 |
I began with my basic bodice pattern. I made this- gosh, nearly two years ago, now. Basically, I put on an oversized t-shirt that I never wanted to see again, and had my mom wrap me in tape. This is usually done with duct tape, but we didn't have any. So instead we improvised with some blue tarp tape we had lying around. Then the whole thing was Michaelangelo'd- everything that was not a bodice pattern got cut off.
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| From bodice 3 |
This pattern then got transfered to canvas, with huuuuuuuuuuuuge seam allowances. This gives me room to let things out if necessary. I didn't think it would be, but you never know. I don't have a photo of this, but I then pinned along the seam lines and tested the fit. I needed to take it in along the front, change the position of the shoulder straps, and take in just a little along the front sides.
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| From bodice 3 |
Here's the end result of my tinkering with the pattern. Oooooh. You'll notice some random lines along the middle of the pieces. Those are where, according to a pattern I had, I should put the boning channels. And yes, it is all drawn in with pencil, even though I recently said that I'd never use pencil while sewing again. That's okay, because this is the inside layer of fabric- there will be fashion fabric covering up my drawing. I don't need to erase anything, even though erasing on canvas works much better than erasing cotton shirting.
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| From bodice 3 |
Next step was to put two layers of canvas together and sew along the pattern lines, giving me my interlining layer. I can basically treat these double-layered pieces like a single layer, now.
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| From bodice 3 |
Another fitting! I pinned the interlining to myself and checked the positioning of the boning. In it's original position, as you can see on the right, it would have done absolutely nothing for me. So I redrafted it to a much steeper angle, requiring a much longer piece of boning, as can be seen on the left. But this way it actually does what it's supposed to do. Whoo.
And that's as far as I've gotten. Next step is to actually sew in the boning channels and cut off the huuuuge seam allowances.
Feelin' a little: |
 creative |