OK, so here’s this weekend’s costuming report. On Saturday, we finished the corset! And I have a few comments about corsets, especially plaid corsets. I now have a theory as to why you don’t find many Scottish corsetieres running around anymore. It’s because the particular combination of sewing a corset AND sewing with plaid will truly drive you insane.
From the front, in the right light, with the right pose, it looks OK. I do like the shape.
As you can see from these pictures, we did not manage to make the plaid line up at the sides, as I feared. Also because I did not use fusible interfacing to iron the fashion fabric onto the interlining, the plaid pulled out of shape in several places. And indeed, it made me sad. But live and learn, right?
The plaid, it is not lining up. Oh hell.
The plaid lines up OK on the front, but you'll notice how the plaid pattern has pulled out of true, especially toward the left top. I should have fused the fashion fabric and the interlining together.
In other corset screw-upery news, we somehow we managed to jack up the cutting so that the corset is a kind of tiny imaginary number size when my daughter has the audacity to be a size that is somewhere on the real number line of sizes. Hence …
Look at that gap in the back will you! Instead of a 2" gap this corset has like an 8" gap. I think we forgot to add back seam allowances after we tore apart the pattern. Or something. But it's a feature, not a bug!
But anyway, the corset is done and we learned a lot and laughed a lot and it looks OK from the front so screw it. On Sunday we downloaded an audiobook (Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) and got to sewing all day on the underskirt. The underskirt, of course, is what’s going to go under the overskirt shown below.
Daughter modeling the scheme for the plaid overdrape skirt, while wearing a pioneer bonnet.
The thing about Sunday’s sewing that really astonishes me is that we spent just about all day on making ruffles. The underskirt is going to require literally miles of ruffles, which I decided to bias-tape hem in the same blue taffeta as I used on the top binding of the corset. This was an easy job, but heck there was a lot of sewing & bias tape making involved in that process. But now the ruffles are edged, we just have to cut them and, you know, ruffle them. Which we will do after daughter hand beads little beads along the edge. I think she’s utterly insane to even attempt such a huge quantity of handwork and am really trying to talk her out of it, but she is both stubborn AND insane. I don’t know where she gets it.
