Waists are a negligible quantity

In part one I concentrated on the technical stuff- drafting the pattern in AutoCAD from the pdf supplied by Foundations Revealed. Now I'll make up the toile to check the fit of the corset.

I made up the first toile and amended the fit slightly. It was very low at the font on me – coming only as high as the bottom of my ribcage. I loved the long-line fit. I decided I would make up the corset to this shape but modernise the design somehow. I wanted to be able to see the original shape as Elizabeth Hume intended, but to modernise it to such an extent that I would be able to wear it as an outer garment without suspenders.

At the first toile stage I marked the waist proper and indicated where the boning would extend to. Obviously to allow the wearer to sit the bones can only extend as far as a standard corset. Here are the photos of my first toile;

I then made the changes to my AutoCAD pattern. Not strictly true to the original but I didn’t like the odd kink to the rear panels 7 & 8 so I amalgamated these and widened sufficiently to allow for the hardware. Here is the second version of my AutoCAD pattern after the first toile, now incorporating three sizes. I made mine to size 10.

In the next part I will make up the final garment using a base layer of coutil and a 100% wool fashion layer.

Waists are a negligible quantity

Armed with my pdf courtesy of Foundations Revealed the first part to my project was to digitise it in AutoCAD so I could play about with the scaling and fit. I therefore imported the pdf file as an ‘x’ reference and  traced the lines;

I oriented the panels so they lined up at the waist so I could get an idea of the measurement – I wanted about a 3 ‘’ reduction on 27’’ so I scaled the panels accordingly allowing for a small gap at the back.

Once I was happy with the size I rotated each panel against each other to check the vertical distances. There were some strange things going on with the original pattern – it didn’t look like they fitted together at-all so I curved new bottom and top lines and extended or trimmed each panel as necessary.

Here are the panels ready for printing;

The waist line also looked off but I figured I could amend that at the toile stage.

In part 2 I will make up the toile!

So I have been working on the E Hume 1913 pattern so I can create a corset for the Foundations Revealed 2015 competiton, and thought I'd share the pattern in my etsy shop. It's a really lovely design however I think rib cages must have been much smaller in Edwardian times! Some tweaking will definitley be needed to fit the modern body!

And here are a couple of pictures of progress so far;