How to Draft a Corset in 47 Easy Steps
I got the urge to draft and make myself a new 16th century style corset. Everyone needs new clothes from time to time and I wasn't completely satisfied with my first attempt from 10 years ago.
Here's my original corset, based on the grave goods described in Patterns of Fashion.
It fit okay. It gaps in the back and the front bustline is too high and the boning is placed wrong over the breasts, and the waist is too low, but it isn't terribly unwearable. It closes with hooks because at the time I had never heard of grommets and had no idea how to install lacing. Hooks are period anyway. I used up most of my then-boyfriend's collection of dry-cleaning hangars for the front boning. It worked well, it will probably stop bullets, but it wore through the single layer of muslin lining on the inside. I used iron-on tape to fix that.
In the spring of 2000 I was fortunate to be able to take a corset drafting class with Drea Leed. It was very informative and I ended up with a custom drfted pattern that looked like this:
Oh look, white paper.
I never actually did anything with this pattern because by this time I had discovered the commercial patterns, and developed the confidence to adjust those, and had several I was happy working with. Here's one, you can see the glare off the tape I used to shape the front piece.
So now it is the winter of 2002-03 and the bodices I made 4 years ago no longer fit me, I actually lost weight (Yeah, I know I shouldn't complain, but they still don't fit me!). I took another bodice drafting class at an SCA event ... and eventually figured out what to do with these instructions. Either I was completely brain dead in class or the teacher's math was wrong. I eventually drafted this out:
I got it to this point (newspaper pattern) after two days of frustrating math. (There were several places where I was told to use 1/2 of a measurement where I actually needed to use 1/4 of it, and it made a huge difference).
Act I: Getting it together
I've decided I want a new corset. Not just a bodice, but a new support/foundation garment to wear that fits me better than my old one.
I make a muslin of the Math Corset. I discover that the old tip to 'take two inches off your measurements' to get a properly fitted corset ONLY applies if you have two inches to spare. I'd have to have surgery in order to make my torso 2" smaller. Yeah, I should complain... my point is that people will give you advice that doesn't always apply, and you have to be able to recognize when those suggestions are inappropriate for your costume needs. Instead of stopping I went back to my previous draft and skipped to the next step.
When I try on the muslin it doesn't fit. And I'm not talking about the 2" problem above. I mean almost every single line of this supposedly custom-drafted pattern is off. The waist, the neckline, the armscye, the side and shoulder seams... I mess with it for an afternoon and get it to fit, taking in the shoulder and changing the angle of the seam, and letting out other places and taking in the back.... and I begin to wonder why I spent two days working out the math on a garment that I am spending another day doing fitting for. Here's the muslin and the changes marked on it so you can see them. It doesn't look like much, but a half inch in the shoulder is the difference between a gap at the armpit or not.
You can see the original shape of the muslin mock-up, I've enhanced some of it with black lines. The red marks are the changes I had to make to the front, and the blue marks are changes I made to the back.
And you know what? When I am all done it is shaped exactly like the commercial pattern I modified a couple years ago. All that work... I use the combo Math Corset and commercial pattern to make myself a lovely new bodice in a black and gold woven fabric with a gold silk lining.
Act II: What was I doing?
I decide, at this point, to use the draft from Drea Leed's corset class and make a pattern which will be my new corset. And here it is.
I make one in muslin and it turns out huge on me, I have several inches of overlap in the front. WTF? I cannot figure out how this has happened. And, to make it worse, I'm having a very difficult time fitting a flimsy muslin corset on myself. No friends, no mannekin, just me and the pins and a mirror.
After a bit I stumble on the idea of using my old corset as a foundation and fitting to that one, after all it did more or less work in the important areas around the bust and ribcage. So I pin the new muslin to my old green corset, and start taking in pleats, as you can see:
A whole lot of pins later I have a muslin that fits. Half an inch here, half an inch there, pretty soon we're talking potato sack. I don't know if the muslin stretched out, or what. I end up with a pattern that is 4" smaller than the one I drafted in class. I didn't think I'd shrunk THAT much.
At this time, two months pass. I lose interest in the corset until a friend mentions an upcoming small local faire in June. We want to go. We need new clothes, of course. I dig out all of my patterns and realize this is something I need to share. Instead of sewing I spend an hour or two writing a web page. Bad habits die hard.
I spend another hour going over all the patterns, drafts, and muslins I've made and getting my bearings. I decide to go strapless. I test fit my muslin and mark the proper waistline, which was too low on my old green corset and my new pattern, then read over Drea Leed's web notes on constructing the Effigy Corset. I am wondering how much stretch to expect, and whether I should build in extra material for shrinkage caused by the boning. After reading and thinking and playing around with the muslin I draw some lines that look right, and make up yet another muslin pattern. This should be The One!
Most of what I do is remove the straps, and redraw the back neckline. Then I extend the bottom by 4" and mark where the tabs will go. Seeing that the Effigy corset was slightly pinched at the waist, I take mine in by half an inch, too. Then I make a mock-up and try it on.
Nope, it's STILL too large in the bust. However, it seems to fit everywhere else. I make ANOTHER correction. I straighten the front edges of the corset. Oooh, I really am shaped like a tube. This time it fits.
I mark the difference between my fitted muslin and my original pattern draft from class and look at the lines. The bust measurement was half an inch too small, and the waist was half an inch too large. It seems that size does matter. Also, the placement of the waistline in the back was incorrect. Two weeks worth of fitting frustration over half inch differences, wow!
It's time to sew. I cut 4 layers of muslin from my pattern. I'm going to need to mark the boning channels before I do assembly. After a bit of thought, I realize that if I draw the imaginary line off the end of the front and back seams I will have a point from which all boning channels originate and will fan out evenly across the garment. Here I've got my muslin pieces laid on a cutting mat to keep them flat, on my ironing board, and I have measured off the lines, which fortunately for me meet right at the end of my board.
I put a pin in the tape measure and start marking fanned channel lines on two of the pieces (right and left sides. I'm not being too fussy, I just want to good feel for which way the lines should go, not exact placement.
I sew the back seams, press them flat, place the right sides together and discover that I sewed the pieces with the marking the wrong way -- it does me no good to have my channel lines inside the garment. After I fix that I pin the two shells together and sew up the fronts and the bottom edges. It looks like this (folded in half):
And now the boning. I dig out the roll of rigilene, iron some flat, and cut two lengths for the front edges. I am going to use hooks again, but I still want nice firm fronts. When those are sewn in I spend a few minutes looking at my corset and re-drawing the lines so that the boning will end up evenly spread across the garment and will go into each of the tabs as well. I spend a boring 30 or 40 minutes talking to the cats and sewing straight lines. Then I iron everything flat.
Time for the boning. Measure. Cut. Iron. Insert. Repeat. For the record, I use approximately 22 feet of plastic boning.
Wow! This is looking good. Too bad it doesn't show in the pictures. But then we are looking at white fabric sewn with white thread and white boning inserts.
I finish up the corset by sewing matching bias tape over the open top edges. There are 7 pairs of hooks and eyes sewn down the front about 2" apart. I could have fit an 8th pair at the bottom, but I leave that open so I can bend at the waist some.
So here it is the spring of 2005 and I've reached the conclusion that this corset doesn't fit me correctly. It's still a good inch too large at the bust. I can tell because if I wear it for any length of time the girls go looking for my belly button. I'm not trying to push my boobs up to my chin, just get the same kind of lift I would off a bra.
Incidently, I finished the black brocade bodice a few months ago. After a couple weeks of hand-sewing gold braid, it looks like this:
