I decided to undertake a Contour Cutting workshop at The Fashion Box, where I did my make-a-dress-in-a-day course back in December. The idea was to create a structured garment that closely followed the contours of a body - in this case, a dress-making dummy.
If you have an adjustable dress-making dummy, then you would tweak the measurements until it was the size of your model (or yourself, if it’s a personal project!) This allows you to make a pattern that is 100% specifically designed for that body shape.
The first step was to play with something called “draping tape”, using it to “draw” the shape of the corset onto the dummy. There are a few rules for this – every section must be able to be cut from a flat piece of fabric, and you have to go over the fullest part of the bust, in order to cater for curves. Other than that, you can pretty much be as imaginative as you like!
Assembling all the different pieces will be tricky, as they are often very similar in shape. To assist, label each piece with numbers (working round the body) or in their relation to the position on the corset (e.g. top cup, inner/side cup)
Next step is to use iron-on interfacing to cut out each pattern piece from the dummy. This is the time to make sure that each piece will actually sit flat, and can be cut from a flat piece of fabric. You draw around the edge of each piece in turn, add lines for notches (which help identify which pieces fit together), add a grain line (down the body) and include the numbered labels for each piece.
Iron the interfacing onto pattern paper, lining up your grain-line arrows with the markings on the paper (in this case, it really did help to have real pattern paper, not just newspaper!)
Add a seam allowance – for normal seams (in this case, around the bust) it was a 1cm seam allowance, but for the vertical seams where the boning will go, it was a 1.5cm seam allowance that needed adding.
Cut out each pattern piece along the outer-most line. These paper pieces are what you need to cut out the fabric!
A corset will need two of each piece, so when cutting out the pattern pieces, it’s best to fold the fabric (right sides together) and you can pin and cut them out two at a time. First glimpse of my fabric - bright blue duchess satin!
For sturdy corsets, you need to create a “strength layer” – this is a Ronseal term, that just makes the corset stronger, and eliminates stretch. This is important, as it is the fabric which does the work of cinching everything in. We used an iron-on fusible layer of fabric, to make the corset much sturdier – basically, fancy interfacing – which was ironed to the wrong side of the outer fabric.
Once you have all your pieces cut out, it’s a good idea to lay them out in order, to try and avoid confusion over order or grain direction.
Now, time for some sewing! It had to come round eventually.
Starting with the middle of the corset (in this case, pieces labelled #1), sew the vertical seams, keeping to a 1.5cm seam allowance and easing any curves into each other. Pinning isn’t really going to work here, as you will be constantly realigning the pieces as you sew them. I guess tacking **might** work, but I hate tacking, so I rarely recommend it! Iron each seam flat as you go.
Don’t forget to check the fit! It’s at this stage that you can make adjustments to the form, taking in seams a bit more where needed.
The next step is to create channels for the boning to sit inside. I used pale blue satin bias binding for this. After ironing the binding out flat, each piece was straight-stitched to the seam allowance at each vertical point.
Now the tricky job of sewing the cups in... This was a Major. Faff. Not only are you sewing a convex shape into a concave shape, there’s also the question of lining up the vertical seams at the bottom of each cup, and then also getting the seam for the “top cup” into matching positions on left and right.
Trimming the seam allowance and some hefty ironing was then required to eliminate “square boob” – but I think the final result works quite well?
I had some supportive cups to sew into the corset too, to help with the structure and support required.
Then I cut pieces of 12mm Rigilene boning to fit inside each vertical boning channel. These should be about 1cm shorter than the length of each channel, to allow for the top and bottom seams.
What should then happen is that you use lining fabric and repeat the cutting-out-and-sewing-together bit, giving you (essentially) two identical corset-shaped articles (one in lining fabric, one in the sturdy, boned outer). These are then sewn together along the top edge, a line of stay-stitching is used to hold it down, and you (hand-)sew the bottom up. But that’s something for another day – this is as much as I got done in 7hrs!
I’ll finish it later on a future post...
