Bernhardt Stays, Round #2, part 2

In my last post, I tried on my 3-year-old mockup of the Bernhardt stays, and they did NOT quite fit. 

I had originally planned on just altering my old pattern to accommodate the new fit issues. However, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that just holistically scaling up the pattern might be a better plan. 

So, I remeasured myself. 25.2 cm from front of shoulder to center back, measured as indicated in Sabine's original post. Divided by 7, this turns into 3.6cm. Last time, I enlarged to 3.25cm. The difference seemed so small that I wasn't sure that I would get much of a change in the overall pattern size, but I was definitely wrong! 

3.25cm pattern laid over 3.6cm pattern

This actually made me a bit nervous that the new pattern would be too large, but I just cut right against the top and bottom edges (removing any seam allowance to reduce overall body length), and stitched it up. 

It wasn't too big! This really is an excellent pattern, it scales so well. The underarm (which gains the most length via the size increase) fit pretty much exactly - any bigger and it would have been too big. The bust gussets were almost PERFECT this time around. 

This fit was overall much more comfortable than the old mockup. Look, no wrinkles! And it didn't feel too tight.

Lift and separate! 

The shoulder straps aren't placed accurately, as I had to pin them onto myself while wearing the stays. Still torn between crossed straps vs. straight...

I'm going to make just a few adjustments (moving the back gusset 1/4" from its neighbor, adding an extra 1" to each side of the back) but this is pretty satisfactory! Moving on to the final stays from here. 

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Coming soon: embroidered garters! With springs - my Wilesco Z80 springs are on the way! 

Buttons and Buttonholes

I have FINALLY gotten around to covering some buttons for Kenny's breeches and waistcoat! It's taken me long enough. After stitching a few buttonholes I have concluded that I need a lot more practice on buttonholes. Good thing I have many more to stitch before his outfit is concluded! Hopefully by the time I get to the coat, they'll be... presentable. Perhaps not perfect but hopefully getting there.

These are the items I used:

Listed from left to right:
1. Measuring tape, for measuring out the space between all the buttonholes. I like my handy retractable one from Jo-Ann's.
2. Sharp "betweens" needles! I like this type needles because they are short and therefore easier for making little stitches, quickly. This kind of needle is often used by quilters for that reason. Mine are made by S. Thomson & Sons, size 10 (the smallest, sharpest size), available here.
3. #60 basting thread. I waffled about purchasing this (because can't one just use normal thread to baste, and just stitch lightly?) but I really love it! It seems to be lightly waxed or something, because it is springy and doesn't twist up on itself. It also is fine enough to keep from leaving any marks on my silk taffeta.
4. Hammer, for pounding the buttonhole chisel. Probably could get away with a rubber mallet for this, but I don't have one.
5. Buttonhole cutter and block. Super-sharp, much nicer than scissors for cutting evenly through all layers of fabric.
6. Silk buttonhole twist. I used Superior Thread's #16 buttonhole silk. This is so much nicer than cotton embroidery twist found at hobby stores. It slides through the fabric like butter!
7. Needle-threader (there is no way I can get the buttonhole twist through that tiny, sharp needle's eye without a little help!)
8. Tailor's thimble. I am NOT a thimble-wearing seamstress, which is probably bad, but I determined to try stitching with one for this project. I used an open-ended tailor's thimble (which is held so that you push the needle through with the side of your finger/thimble), and I really liked it. Still feels a little awkward, but I'm getting the hang of it the more I use it. (NOTE: I bought mine from WAWAK, they have a variety here, and I did NOT realize that I would be getting a dozen of them for $2.29! That is what happened to me. Maybe they wear out? Maybe they were mis-packed? Just a head's-up.)
10. Scissors and pliers, for pulling stubborn needles through the fabric and clipping threads.


Stitching the Buttonhole:
I started out by basting (with a ginormous pad-stitch?) around the spaces where the buttonhole would go. The below picture shows that handy-dandy basting thread in action, as well as the tailor's thimble doing what thimbles do.

The index finger starts things off by guiding the needle into the fabric,
and then the middle finger with the thimble comes up behind
and does all the heavy lifting (pushing the needle through).

Next, I punched a slit almost the length of the buttonhole into my fabric. (I broke the little wooden chisel block in the process. Sad. Will use a scrap of 2x4 next time.)

Then I whipped the edges of the new slit with basting thread. Just to keep things tidy and all in place when stitching with the silk twist.

I ran two long stitches (with my buttonhole twist) along each side of the buttonhole. I'll later stitch over these and they will help reinforce the overall buttonhole. Notice that the long stitches extend a little ways past my cut-out. Back in the day (vaguely late 18th century), buttonholes were often decorative, and also often excessively long. Even when a buttonhole was functional, the stitching would often extend way past the actual slit in the fabric, to create the visual impression of a long buttonhole even if the actual hole was pretty small. I am not quite sure when this practice stopped - I think that by the turn of the century, buttonholes were shrinking back to a respectably practical size, but I don't have a lot of research to prove when that happened. (Also note, I just used my silk twist for these base stitches. Probably I should have used something weightier, like buttonhole gimp, but I guess I'll try that next time!)

Starting where I want the non-functional end of my buttonhole to be, I started stitching along one side of my buttonhole, wrapping the thread around my needle for each stitch (as per this Burnley & Trowbridge tutorial on 18th century buttonholes).

Once my stitches reached the slit in the fabric, I started going straight through the slit and coming up on the outside edge of the buttonhole, still wrapping the thread around the needle. My fabric has narrow, buttonhole-width stripes, which made it a perfect guide!

At the end of the buttonhole, I made two long stitches across the width of the buttonhole. These are to support my bar tack. The bar tack is stitched just like the first end of the buttonhole was - little stitches in and out of the fabric, wrapping the thread around the needle as I go.

Aaand, back we go. All the way to the end where I started.

One more bar tack... (I am miserable at bar tacks. Need a lot of practice!)

And the buttonhole is finished!

I clearly need to work on my tension - silk taffeta is not super forgiving when it comes to poor tension/fabric slippage. But, glad to be almost done with this piece. Just have to add the covered buttons and slip an extra wedge of fabric in the back (it is a bit snug around the waist), and it will be complete!

Useful resources:
- Burnley & Trowbridge tutorial (on facebook)
- YouTube video of Mr. Stuart Lille of Ft. Ticonderoga stitching 18th century buttonholes (updated here)
- Overview of 18th century buttonhole-making, by Mara Riley (somehow, my buttonholes look nothing like hers. Hmm.)

And a couple of fun links about thimbles and their uses:
- The Purl Bee looks at lots of different kinds of thimbles
- The English Cut - Savile Row blog offers a couple tips on how to use a tailor's thimble

J.S. Bernhardt Stays - Part 3 - The Details

I may be getting a little ahead of myself, because I haven't even cut out my final fabric yet, but I have spent much of today (another snow day!!) researching finishing details. Lots of little things add up to make an accurate finished product, and I want to make this corset as accurate as I can with my present resources.

There are four things I need to check and confirm to finish off my corset: 

• What color/quality thread should I use? This one was fairly easy to figure out - most of the extant examples that I have seen use matching or very tonal (close to matching) sew thread. My stays are going to be ivory/cream-coloured, so my safest bet is an easy match. However... that being said, I kind of think that matching is boring. The plan for this corset now is to stitch it up with blue/green/pink silk thread! 
• Sabine mentions here that J.C. Hüttner's Englische Miscellen mentions light grey silk thread. The book is available on Google Books, but it is entirely in German, so I am trusting her judgement on this one. 

• Almost all of the extant stays/corsets that I looked at (in a range between 1790 and 1830) are listed by the museum websites as stitched with silk thread, so that firmly establishes my thread quality.

• What type of boning/reinforcement should I use? Unfortunately (actually, fortunately, save the whales and all that), I don't have access to baleen. So... cable ties to the rescue! This is my least authentic material, but I'm not going to source real baleen, and while this German plastic boning has been reputed to be a good substitute, I have a package of cable ties in a drawer in my sewing room. How then should I place the boning? 
• The corset below (c. 1820-30) has just cording in the back to reinforce the lacing. I don't really like how wobbly and bumpy that allows the back to be when the stays are laced up, so I would prefer to not go with that method. 

Corset, ca. 1820-1830, Kent State collections 1995.017.1349

• Boning flanking the lacing holes is mentioned in Hüttner's Englische Miscellen, and can be seen in many of the examples I reviewed between1790 and 1830. 

Stays, ca. 1790, V&A museum no. T.237-1983



Corset, ca. 1825-35, V&A museum no. T.27-1948



• If these stays seem too plain to me, I might cord them a bit. I found a great example at the MET (can you tell this is my fave museum? All those zoom-able photos!) that shows a bit of the interior-back. You can see what looks like wool yarn, poking out of the cording channels. This is exactly how trapunto is done - you have to leave those little end-loops pocking out to provide some ease to the stuffing. 

Corset, ca. 1810s-20s, MET accession no. 1970.103.5

• How should I finish the edges of the stays? Do I bind with self-fabric bias binding? What about twill tape? Or just turning the edges under and butting them against the lining? I found examples of all of these methods.
• Twill tape: this seemed to be really common 1820-1840. The tape was usually DTM (dyed-to-match, meaning the same color as the body fabric), but I found a very pretty example with contrasting twill tape binding at the MET (below-left). I also have seen this on older, transitional stays (below-right). 

Corset, ca. 1815-25, MET accession no. 2009.300.3229
Note that the same twill tape as the binding
is used to secure the busk in its channel.

 Stays, ca. late 18th cent., MET accession no. C.I.41.94
This tape is probably originally DTM.

• Self-fabric binding: this method was pretty common on the whole range of stays/corsets that I looked at. Sometimes the binding appeared to be cut on the bias, but sometimes it was clearly cut on the straight grain (nightmare for curves!) 

• Faced edges: facing the edges with the lining (or just turning the fabric over the lining to finish) was definitely not the most common method of finishing the neck and hem edges, but I saw it on a few corsets. I don't think I'll go with this method, too much of a pain to press all the edges under before whipping the lining to them. 

Corset, ca. 1811, MET accession no. X.51.4.2
This is one of only two corsets that I observed with that interesting button-flap securing the busk.

• What technique should I use for the lacing holes? Spiral lacing, I think. The Laced Angel made a great spreadsheet on Romantic Era (1820-35ish) corsets, and her research indicates that spiral-lacing and crisscross-lacing were pretty common at least by those dates. However, spiral-lacing is a bit older technique, and I haven't tried it yet, so I'd like to give it a go. Below you can see an example of both techniques, and Jen of Festive Attyre explains spiral lacing here. 

Corset, ca. 1811, MET accession number X.51.4.2
See how the lacing holes are all off-balance?
With holes closer-together at the top and bottom?
That indicates spiral lacing. 



Corset, ca. 1840s, MET accession no. C.I.42.74.12

The lacing holes on this example are exactly symmetrical,
indicating crisscross-lacing (not the technical term.)




• On the corsets I reviewed I saw a lot of bone eyelets, a good many stitched eyelets, and zero metal eyelets. Metal eyelets were more or less invented in 1827 (ref. Corsets and Crinolines, by Norah Waugh), so they definitely wouldn't have been around in 1810-15. I don't presently know of a resource for bone eyelets, or I would totally go with those (50x less stitching to be done!). Alas, I'll have to stitch them (unless any of my kind readers can point me in the direction of a bone eyelet supplier! I have been checking out bone ear gauges, but they don't have a proper lip under the eyelet to keep the fabric tucked under).

Now I am off to finally cut out and baste up my new stays in final fabric. I leave you with a sketch of possible cording patterns (nothing super period-correct, just a product of doodling away while watching Sherlock, which is awesome.) 

J.S. Bernhardt Stays - Part 2

Monday night, I actually managed to  modify my mock-up to narrow all the gussets! (Two days of sewing in a row, this is an accomplishment for me. Then it completely stopped for the week, of course.)

I decided that I really did want to raise the bust gussets by 0.5", so I stitched up the gusset slits by 0.5" (if you peer closely at the picture on the left, below, you can see my puckery seam stitching up the bottom of the gusset.) I also raised made the gusset significantly smaller, taking out a half inch in width and even more than that at the top edge. The rounded "almond" shape helps the gusset form a nice, rounded cup shape when stitched into the stays.

 For the hip gussets, I decided to take 1.25" out of the centre of the big gusset, and 0.75" out of the little gusset. To do that, I just folded them down the center and pinned,  and then I stitched out the excess like darts. 

Then, I tried it on again. Below you can see the same pose as last pose, for a fit comparison. My breasts are definitely lifted a little better, and there is no excess fabric in the gussets. The hips fit much more snugly, although I could probably take out a smidge more, as Sabine noted that the corset will stretch a bit after being worn on a warm body - every corset does this, but a corset on the bias probably does this a little bit more. 

The slightly less interesting photo on the left, below, also provides a nice comparison to the front view in the last post.  I think my bustline is significantly raised, but I have a hard time seeing it in this picture. Mostly because my waist is short, so I just look a little stumpy overall from this angle. But the other photos clearly indicate an accurate shape, so I am going to keep the bust gussets as they are. 

In the back, you can see I am still getting some unsightly drag lines from the side-back hip gusset, and the centre-back (CB) lacing. I think that  lowering the highest point of that gusset may help with this problem - I'm just going to make that revision in my final fabric.

While I was wearing the corset, I blindly stabbed at the bottom hem with a pencil (as you can see from my indiscriminate marks below), and thereby determined some sort of shape to the bottom edge. This is probably the most flexible aspect of the corset pattern - I could make the bottom hem whatever shape I please. The red line indicates which shape I please, this time around. 

That done, I just measured out what was to be removed from the corset and chopped it off of my gusset pattern pieces. 

My pattern is ready, time to cut fabric, woohoo! 

 

HSF Challenge #4: Under It All - J.S. Bernhardt Stays, c. 1810-11

As I have reduced my aim for the HSF 2014 to cover only twelve projects (at least), instead of twenty-four, I am skipping around a little bit with the challenges, picking and choosing the ones that I like. Technically, if I am doing the odd-numbered challenges, I should be working on the #3: Pink challenge. However, I have a total of two pieces of pink fabric in my stash, and neither of them are period-accurate. Because I don't love pink, I don't particularly want to go buy pink fabric for a pink project. If something pops up when I am next fabric shopping, I might re-think this challenge. But for now, I am choosing instead to work on Challenge #4: Under It All.

My current stays are too small, and not super accurate. The lower-back gussets are not cut high enough for the lovehandles I've acquired in the past few years, so they cause a little bit of lower-back pain after wearing for a while. The bust gussets are just plain too small, and a set a little too closely together in the front for a proper silhouette. To top it off, there is zero lacing gap in the back (I would prefer a 2"- 4" gap). I made these when I was sixteen, and I still love them for the purpose they served at the time, but I need an upgrade. My body has changed shape and I have learned a bit more about this era, and it is time to reflect these changes in a new set of undergarments!

I need to make a simple pair of stays, due to time constraints for this project (my last pair took many, many hours of cording and embroidery). Perhaps eventually I will cord/embroider my new pair, but I first need to be able to whip up a wearable foundation! Frills and furbelows come after.

At first, I was torn between making short stays and long stays - the only extant short stays I have seen have been transitional stays c. 1790s (Sabine of Kleidung um 1800 addresses this in a well-researched post here, noting that the short stays we see post-Transition appear to be for certain occasions such as travel, or informal morning/evening wear). I wanted slightly later stays, and was thinking about making those short "travel" stays, because short stays are just easier to wear.

And then, lo, I came across Sabine's amazing post (should really be called an article or presentation, it is so in-depth) about J.S. Bernhardt's patterns for short stays. Apparently these stays are designed so as to healthily embrace the body, without excess of boning, and provide decent support.

~angels sing~

This is exactly what I need! Sabine already put the patterns on grids for scaling, and she advises how to measure to scale up for your own size. Check out this post and read, read, read, because it is amazing and so helpful. Thanks to Sabine for her generosity in sharing all of this information and effort with the rest of us!

Following her instructions, I took the pattern below, measured myself, and scaled.

I placed a ruler in front of my shoulder to find the correct point to measure from to get my scale multiplier. My personal measurement was 23cm from the ruler around to the centre of my back. I rounded this down to 22.75cm, so that it divided by 7 into a nice, simple 3.25cm. I then scaled up the pattern so that each square = 3.25cm. Then I printed this out in two parts on 11"x17" paper and taped the pattern together.

It is very interesting to me that this pattern is cut on the bias. I haven't yet observed an extant example that is cut on the bias, but it makes perfect sense in order to hug the figure. I decided to just cut mine on a bias fold, instead of putting a seam down the centre. I might switch that up on the final piece, because the seam probably adds a little structure to the stays.

I added an inch to the CB edge, which ended up being pretty
unnecessary. Better to cut off extra than not have enough, though!

To measure out my gussets (because the ones on the original pattern are pretty tiny and were not going to make it across my girth), I cut the slits for the gussets and then held the corset up against myself and measured across the gaps created at slit. Check out my super-scientific method for patterning gussets:

I literally drew a slice of pie with a measuring tape
across the top indicating how wide the gusset should be.

Fast-forward to the completed mock-up! I don't have any in-progress pictures because, well, there wasn't much to progress. I folded under the CB edges to create boning channels, and I hastily stitched a strip of fabric down the CF to hold my busk. Then I mentally patted myself on the back for actually including boning channels (because I HATE making boning channels on mock-ups, it always seems so pointless. It is, in reality, the opposite of pointless, but when I always end up chucking the mock-up, it seems excessive.) Finally, I pinned and stitched all six of the gussets. Voila, mock-up finished.

I had no lacing tape, so I used eyelet lace from my stash.

Time for the first try-on! The eyelet lace works in a pinch, but I will probably have to get lacing strips to get a more even back closure on future corset mock-ups. For this project, it worked, and I know what I need to do to modify the pattern before cutting final fabric.

UBER-curvy! Did not expect that. 

So... it was a bit curvalicious on me. That was unexpected, considering all the mashing and squashing my other stays have been doing. I kind of like it!

Things that are Right about this so far: 

• it is curvy - my body is curvy, so that is kind of great. I am not large, but I am short-waisted and have wide hips, which I would prefer to embrace rather than straight-jacket.
• it is short - refer to afore-mentioned short waist. No more boning digging into my thighs when I sit! 
• my breasts are shoved up and out - the ideal silhouette. I didn't think that one gusset would cut it (I am a 34D), but it sure does work out! The singular gusset actually helps with the sideways persuasion of the breasts. I might raise the gussets by 1/2" to get a smidgen more lift - should I? Or are they high enough? 
• I love where the straps are located - they are far out on each side in the front, which is excellent for those wide Regency necklines, and they meet at a perfect place on the back (I like how the straps join the back at an angle, rather than attaching to the horizontal top edge.)

Things that are Wrong about this mock-up:

• the bust gussets are a smidgen too wide at the top - I think I will round out the edges of the gussets a little bit, so they are not a perfect triangle, and thereby draw in the top corners a bit.
• I need to re-shape the bottom edge, for sure - that widest gusset curves too low. 
• both hip gussets are a bit too wide - I think I need to take 1/2"from the little one, and 1" from the big one. 
• I may need to remove a smidge off the upper back opening - I usually have problems with lacing gaps at the top, where they close up too much. That will throw off the straight-grain, though, hopefully that is not a big problem... 

My bustline seems a bit low in this image... have
to decide whether to raise the gussets!

Too much fabric going on down there. 

The hip gussets come up a little high on my back
but there are worse evils. I think I will leave them.

I think I am ready to move on to fabric! I am in love with this pattern.