16th Century Stays Part 1: Drafting the Pattern
In my first post here I mentioned how much I admire Angela Clayton’s work and how much braver she is than I when it comes to her projects.
Around 18 months ago when I was living in Colchester, Essex and volunteering with the wardrobe department in The Mercury Theatre, the wardrobe supervisor offered to teach me how to make a corset. At this point I had only a 6 week dressmaking course under my belt and I was excited and nervous to do it. Unfortunately, Corinna was so busy we never got the opportunity to get to work and so the fabrics and materials I bought for this project just languished on my shelf.
Last week I was flicking through my copy of 'The Tudor Tailor' by Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm Davies, and saw these stays:
I remembered how impressed I was with Angela’s beautiful stays, and without giving myself time to think I got to work!
I started by tracing around my size 12 'Close Fitting Bodice Block', which I drafted using the method from 'Metric Pattern Cutting For Women's Wear' by Winifred Aldrich:
I took that photo before I realised that there was no point in tracing on to paper, so I did it on to calico, cut out the patterns and pinned them on to my dress form.
My dress form is actually a size 10, so i had to do a little pinning and added the darts to get the calico to lie flat before I roughly drew on the shape I wanted. The wrinkles here look much worse than they actually were :)
When I was happy with the shape, I took the pattern off the form, used a Pattern Master to shape the edges, cut it out and transferred it on to the paper from earlier.
I added 1/2 inch S/A to the bottom and top and a 1.5 cm to the other seams. I gave the 1/2 inch because the book suggested that- it works out at 1.27 cm which is a nightmare to mark, I wish I'd done 1.5cm the whole way round! Live and learn, eh? Anyways, my paper pattern looked like this:
The last part of the prep was to cut out the pieces in my fashion fabric and my 'canvas layer'. I'll show the fashion fabric in the next post otherwise this will be gratuitously long!
Aaaand they fit pretty darn perfectly! *finger guns*
I'll leave you on that cliffhanger, there's more thrills and kicks where that came from!
