Titanic Era Corset: Reproducing a 100 year old Antique

Hello everyone, and welcome back. Today I'm going to be doing a bit of an unexpected project for me. You see, I had made a very lovely 19-teens corset about 10 years ago. However, as you may realize, a lot can happen in 10 years, and when I went to put that corset on again recently, I discovered that was not going to happen. So I need to make a new 19-teens corset, as I do have quite a few projects coming up in that era that will require it. Fortunately for me, I also have an original corset from the 19-teens that a friend very generously gifted me a few years back, and it happens to be my size. In fact, it is one of the mass-produced corsets of the 19-teens, which therefore has the size literally stamped on the interior. Now, mass-produced corsets in this time were very common. They're a very simple construction and are made up of not very many parts. In fact, they're usually single-layer cotton with only a little bit of reinforcement where the bones go, and there's not very many of those, and at the front and the back. So interestingly enough, corsets in this time period are very simple and also very unstructured in comparison to what you might expect. Because this era isn't looking to modify the body much, if at all, it's simply looking to smooth out the figure and make sure that you have good posture and support for your clothes. The corset really doesn't need much to it. In fact, it had already lowered the top edge enough that it no longer supported the bust, which is one of the reasons why brassiere started to come into fashion. But this particular style of corset is very comfortable, easy to wear, easy to function in, and is also a very plain and simple design. So I'm going to use this as a great opportunity to show you how I take patterns off of original garments, since this is a clear and flat piece, not something with lots of pleats and tucks that I have to dig inside. But I can show you that, and I can show you the construction, and a little bit about how the corset actually fits as well. I always like to start my patterning by drawing a straight line that gives me my basis for the grain. In the case of the back pieces, it's fairly simple because this will also be the center back line, but this isn't always the case for every pattern piece. Some things never line up with the grain line at all, but it does still help me to find a true point that is a corner of two seams, and I will keep returning to that corner over and over and over again to make sure that I haven't skewed my drawing as I've been going along. Even very stiff fabric can be a little bit widgey and move as you work with it, so it's always good to double check numerous times throughout the process that you haven't moved a quarter of an inch off in one direction or another. The side seams in this corset have boning in them, so I can't actually fold directly on the seam to see where that line needs to be, so I'm just drawing where the edge of the boning is and then adding a line further over from that. For the top and the bottom, it's a little bit easier for me to roll the fabric back as I go, make little marks, and essentially connect the dots to complete the piece. Fortunately for me, this corset is still in very good condition in terms of the fabric strength, so I don't have to worry about touching it and having it shred and fall apart, so I will work my hand across the garment trying to flatten and spread out the wrinkles as I go. This is not something I'll necessarily do with all garments. Some larger things or some very fragile things, it's easier to work with paper or a thin fabric on top of the garment, but in this case, since it is a small and relatively flat garment, it's much easier for me to work the garment along the pattern itself, making sure that I've spread it out and smoothed it down. Additional information can be found through measurements. This is something that is especially useful when you're dealing with garments that have a lot of pleats or gathers. It's not always easy to find a way to lay it flat and check it that way, so instead that's when I will get out a ruler or a measuring tape. It's at this point that I finish up drawing out the pattern, and I want to double check that these measurements are actually what the stamp says they are and are going to fit me. So both the waist and the hip are about what they need to be in order to fit my body, so I'm just going to go ahead and make it up as is, assuming that I am a standard body shape. For cutting out the fabric, I chose not to add seam allowance to my pattern for a number of reasons, one of which is just that it's not quite as perfect of a system. I do however mark what the seam allowances need to be on each side. Some sides need only a quarter inch, while others will need half an inch. I chose also to lay out the pattern pieces single layer so that way I don't have to worry about being a little bit off grain, which is especially obvious with this fabric. I have to cut a few extra pieces out of various fabrics for the boning channels and the binding, as well as paper and buckram to interface the boning channels. The paper that I chose to go with is from one of my sketchbooks, which is a so I could actually get the full length of the boning channels I need out of that one sheet of paper. Most of the seams in this garment are done with a flat felled method. Essentially what they do is they fold back both sides of the seams and overlap them, so that way you're top stitching twice and catching both the top and the bottom seam allowance. You can also do this by seaming the pieces together right side to right side, flipping the seam allowance to one side, and folding it over twice for the upper layer, but it creates one more line of stitching that wasn't in the original corset and isn't completely necessary. For the center back, the lacing strip is finished off with a plain weave cotton that has a strip of paper on the interior of it. It helps also with the paper to make sure that you are ironing a completely straight line. I did have a little bit of an issue with the mechanical stretch that I found in my fabric. Now, it's 100% cotton, so it does not have any actual stretch fibers in it. However, I did find that on the weft of the fabric there was a little bit of stretch, and so I decided to cut my corset sideways so that way that stretch would run vertically on the corset. While this did help in making sure that it was going to fit correctly, it did mean that it was a little bit problematic when I was stitching very rigid boning channels and facings onto the corset, and the fabric would want to sort of keep shifting along and stretching. So I used a few different methods to prevent this. I can use a walking foot, but not everybody has those, so instead I like to use a pin to sort of keep the pressure down as I'm stitching right up to that spot. For the front busk, this is where the little strip of buckram comes in. I could just see it through the slits that were made for the busk, and if you hold the entire corset up to light, you can also see about how far down and how far over the piece of buckram went. Both the buckram and the front edge are just simply clipped open to make it around the busk. For the seam allowances for the two full-length vertical seams that there are, they finish off the inside of those seams by placing the boning channels over them. This means that they don't need to be lapped in the same way that the other horizontal seams and curved seams need to be. Instead, all I needed to do was stitch right side to right side with a quarter inch seam allowance and press the seam allowance to one side. The top stitching is then done to create boning channels. The piece of fabric, again with the paper strip on the inside, is added over the seam on the interior and it's pretty much centered up just a little bit off, so that way the top stitching line just inside of the folded edge will be the exact center. This can be a little hard to get it centered up perfectly, and it's a little hard to pin as well, since I can't pin through the paper part of the boning channels. Instead, I'm pinning very carefully to just that little seam allowance, and I'm using the fact that the fabric is just a little bit see-through to hold it up to the light and make sure that I am centered up as well as I can be. I'm then going to go along and top stitch down just that very center, and then from the inside I will top stitch so that way the boning channels are the correct width for my boning. The use of the paper strips along with the facing not only serves a purpose to reinforce that area, I did also find that it helped to keep the in place since there is absolutely no stitching holding the boning in place. It can move about as you need it to, but with the paper it seemed to have enough friction that it didn't move around easily. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to get grommets as small as the original ones are. However, the double zero grommets that you can get from most corset suppliers do fairly well. Most of the time I will insert my grommets by using an awl to open up the hole. It makes it so that way there's far less damage and it's far less likely that the grommets will eventually pull or rip out of the corset, since the fabric itself is sort of built up strength by forcing the fibers outwards. However, since I'm going through a paper strip, it is not so much an option and I would end up ripping the paper, so I do have to punch a hole and insert the grommet that way. The boning is then inserted and pushed out of the way so that way we can do the binding, which is done in another type of plain weave cotton. They simply double fold the edges. It's sort of like a bias tape, but it's not on the bias, it's still on the straight grain. They don't even bother to finish off the edges, another sign that this corset is very much a quickly mass-produced thing. The only decoration on this corset is that there is a jacquard cotton ribbon at the top edge. I managed to find one that was very similar, though it's a little bit bigger, but it still looks very nice. They finish off the edges of the ribbon simply by folding over the edges and wrapping them around the back. The final challenge that I had with this corset is the little hook and eye that is down at the bottom of the busk. Now, I honestly don't know where to get these sort of industrial hooks and eyes, and I also feel like it might need some sort of press in order to finish them off. However, I did realize that I had some industrial hook and eye tape that I had picked up years ago, and I believe it's fairly easy to find. So all I did was simply take a pair of pliers, wrench open the hook and the eye loops, and pop out the little grommet pieces. I cut some holes into my corset, inserted the grommet again, and simply pressed the hook and eye loops back around. It's not exactly the same hook and eye, but it is very similar, and it should hold up to the same amount of stress that the original did.