Achieving That Classic Edwardian Shape: Reconstructing a 1902 Bust Bodice

One of the most defining features of the turn-of-the-century silhouette is this. You've seen them, swan-like ladies of impossible shapes and proportions. But that was ye olden days, right? Obviously, human bodies were shaped differently, right? Um, no? Let me tell you a thing. Historical humans, Edwardians included, were masters of disguise and supremely skilled at underwear, particularly undergarments that had the ability to completely and seamlessly influence the outer shape. I have long wanted to try my hand at one of these bust bodices, because as we've learned with last year's 1890s corset project, the reduction aspect of a corset in achieving a 19th- or early-20th-century silhouette only works when the body is full enough in the right places to begin with. Some people actually require a bit more help building out than taking in, a perhaps less-than-frequently-discussed trick of historical silhouette, but just as important as the more prevalent concept of corsetry, nonetheless. Fortunately, there happened to be a wonderful example of a surviving bust bodice in the Symington Collection. I'm starting off with a mock-up, of course, just to be sure that the pattern pieces all go nicely together. But since one of the most significant shaping factors of this garment are the horizontal stiffening rails, I'm going to tackle those first. Prepare ye for some serious nerd hype, because this research hole was riveting. So basically, when we were examining the original garment, one of the horizontal channels had worn through to reveal several small strips of bound feather quills, which the object description provided by the collection informed us were goose quills. This, ladies and gentlefolk, is an actual, real-life application of the patented feather bone, which makes my little nerd heart sing because how often are we literally handed primary, detailed information on exactly what a thing is and how to do it? Well, quite often in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, because those people really liked to flex their swanky new systems and inventions, which is why it's particular fun to work in this period. But anyway, feather bone was patented in 1883 by Edward Warren of the Warren Feather Bone Company in response to the diminishing supply and thus increased cost of whale bone, and utilized stripped quills of turkey, goose, or chicken feathers, which, quote, "'heretofore' had little or no commercial value." Warren's patent describes the process by which this feather bone is made. Splitting or otherwise reducing, either by hand or machinery, but preferably by machinery, the quills into splints. These splints, or burrs, may be held together by any suitable external binding. Thus, I wrap them with either wire or thread by winding, braiding, twisting, or they may be cemented or be otherwise put up together to form a feather bone of any desired shape in its transverse section. The feather bone present on the Stymington bodice was in all likelihood manufactured by machine. In fact, the entire bust bodice is machine-stitched, so this is definitely a mass-manufacture item with very little handcraft in it. But obviously, as I don't have the appropriate feather bone manufacturing machinery, whatever that actually is, I bound my boning by hand using linen thread. And as I would need three 23-inch long lengths, I decided to bind one continuous 2 1⁄2 yard strip that I could then cut down to size, just like regular modern strip boning. This is achieved by intermittently slotting new strips of split quill as I continue binding everything together so that I end up with one long, even strip of quill bone. This 2 1⁄2 yards, it turns out, required more than the dozen feathers I'd bought. Luckily, I have a handy stash of goose feathers which have not yet been cut into quill pens, so another half dozen did the trick. The boning that I examined on the original also did seem to be glued, or cemented, I guess, after binding, presumably for strength or perhaps to better hold the curved shape. So I coated my finished strip of bone liberally. As we didn't have the ability to chemically test precisely what this glue was made from, I'm using rabbit skin glue here. Definitely accurate up through the 18th century and available during the 19th century, whether or not this would have been the substance of post-industrial choice, questionable. All right, so here is where we are in bust bodice land so far. I mean, the pattern pieces have gone together quite wonderfully. It doesn't have this thick bust in it yet. So there was a little bit of question here so this probably is not correct. There does seem to be a little bit too much width here and I had a look at the original bust bodice. There is a little bit of gaping on the original, just where the length of the bust bodice is a bit longer than the torso of the mannequin. I mean, my torso is likewise not this long, so I will have to probably take some width out of this, but the original panel does seem to slope up just a little bit more instead of coming more out here and then up. So this is something I will have to correct on the pattern. By the way, I've just sort of pinned these rails. I'm calling them rails just because that's what these horizontal bones were called on 18th century stays. Definitely no evidence that this is correct, actual historically used terminology for this bust bodice, but that's what I'm going to call it for now. Terminology is a very slippery, nasty, dangerous slope. The actual bust bodice has a lot more curve. I did initially put this on the mannequin and I was like, oh my God, this is all wrong. It doesn't come up this high. Why is this gaping? But then I realized that I did not pre-shape the bones for this mock-up on the actual bust bodice. It does curve out a lot more like this, which puts the top of it in a much better position and also helps the top of it sit flatter against the chest. Because these are flat steel bones, they can be bent into shape, and that's what I will be doing before I put these into the boning channels on the actual thing. So that's where we are so far, just mock-upping. It seems to be working fine. I'm ready now to get started on the bobinet version of this. By the way, excuse this absolutely hideous stitching, but you know what? Machines are not my jam. So before we can get started on cutting out the bobinet, we first have to put some starch into this because the original bust bodice is very, very stiff. I have here some potato starch. I mean, in the Victorian period, they probably would have had actual purpose laundry starch, but I couldn't find any in the grocery store that wasn't spray bottle starch that includes chemicals and silicone and stuff, so I decided I'm going to go the natural route. I have some water boiling over there, getting ready to help us with this endeavor, and I also have my notes on starching from when I actually learned how to do this in 2018. I've since forgotten how to do this, but we are going to see if we can re-remind ourselves how this works. It is a very delicate balance, all of this starching stuff. There's some serious chemistry, I guess, that has to go on because in order for the starch to get to the right consistency, it has to have the right timings and amounts of cold water to hot water, so we're going to do some experimenting and see if we can get things to behave today. Cesario thinks he's getting some food, but alas, not right now, sir. So my feeble attempts at starch making were not nearly so successful as Constance McKenzie's, who has just conveniently put up an entire extremely detailed walkthrough of how to make up Victorian-approvable laundering starch in a way that does not involve it congealing mostly into jelly, as I have done here, so I shall link that down below for the deeply curious to go and have a ponder at for actually useful instruction. I also realized after the starching fact that I literally do not have a warm, dry place for drying starched items. Constance is an actual Edwardian, so she has an aga for this purpose, but I have neither an equally suitable radiator nor sunny outdoor space to hang this, so I resorted to stretching it out on the piggy gate within the path of the very 21st century HVAC flow, which seemed to, well, it did dry eventually. The next day, I had a very stiff and very misshapen length of bobbinette, which I sorted out by pressing it back into a respectable shape. And at long last, we are finally ready to actually cut the pieces out. This bust bodice is made up of four pieces, a small center front strip, and three curved panels on either side. It doesn't reach all the way to close in the back. It only ties shut, so this should be fairly accommodating to a lot of sizes. And aside from the length adjustment on the back panel, I didn't need to make any fit changes on the mock-up. The purpose of this garment, after all, is to create shape, not to conform to the shape that I have. Anyway, the pieces are all pinned together pretty straightforwardly. By the way, for those of you who watched the fabric shopping vlog and got to hear my color-matching woes, I ended up bleaching the bobbinette to this nice white, so all turned out well in the end. So everything is pinned together, except then I remember that the center front strip is actually backed with a layer of fine cotton and features another double layer of fine cotton a little bit ways down the strip to form a pocket for the busk. There are also 12 vertical boning channels from this same cotton, as well as three horizontal boning strips, and 50 inches of binding. Basically, there are a lot of little cotton pieces I still need, so I paused the pinning for a moment to cut all of this out. For the quarter-inch binding, I'm cutting out half-inch strips on the bias, which is rather unusual for historical binding. Often, it's cut on the straight, but this garment is either late enough that people have stopped caring about the amount of fabric wastage involved in bias cutting, or the mass manufacture of these bodices allowed for bias strips to be cut in bulk with minimal wastage. I'm also cutting one-inch strips plus seam allowance for the center front panel backing, and net one-inch strips to form the quarter-inch boning channels. Before I proceed with putting the things together, I'm first just pressing quarter-inch folds along the 12 boning channel strips so that my clean-edged quarter-inch channels are ready to go. I'm also doing this on the three larger horizontal channels. First and foremost, I'm pinning the cotton backing to the narrow center front strip of net, since this is the only panel that's backed. I also pinned the doubled pocket layer on here, but realized that those actually need to not be put on right now for logistical reasons you shall soon discover, so maybe just ignore that a little. Then I proceeded to pin together the rest of the pieces. If you're popping in here for the first time, this is my pretty little machine friend, a hand-turned Singer machine made in 1891 that I shall be doing all of the construction for this project on. Literally everything on the original bust bodice is machine-stitched, originally likely with specialty industrial state-of-the-art Edwardian machinery, not my little domestic friend here, but it's the closest thing I can get to reproducing the original construction methods. The seams are then pressed flat. These seam allowances are trimmed down to 3 16ths of an inch, which for you metric people, I apologize. Basically, it is just one hair under a quarter of an inch so that they fit under the quarter inch boning channels without poking out at all. Then, using the marks on the patterns, I'm marking where the ends of the horizontal channels need to start and stop so that I have some guidelines of where to pin those channels. But before I can put in the channels, I'm first just prepping the feather bone. If you've never worked with feathers before, basically, they're really sculptable when heated and softened, then cooled into shape. So I'm using a bit of intuition here, steaming the quills heavily with an iron and then molding them into a distinct curved shape so that they'll harden into a specific curve. The feather bone in the original bust bodice was extremely hardened into the curved shape and physically would not bend outwards, unlike my feather bone here, which is currently content to lay completely flat, if I put it that way. So it seems to me that a bit of steaming and shaping is necessary to achieve that strong curve. So here is where we are so far. I have gone ahead and I have marked where the three horizontal channels for the rails will go on this. Of course, I reread my construction order notes and realized that the bust pocket bit that I had put onto the busk thing and stitched all in one is not what I'm supposed to do because these rails will run through that and then the stitching will be here and you won't be able to get the busk in. So I did have to rip out this panel, take off this busk pocket, and then restitch this panel down so that I can get the rail channels on here and then stitch this on so that it actually functions, which will be very nice. Meanwhile, I have the rails. I've just sort of shaped them like that and I'm going to leave them there overnight so that maybe they have a little bit nicer of a curved shape. Feathers, when they are steamed and put into shape, do tend to hold that shape really well, hence why the bust bodice that we studied at the Simonton Collection was still very, very rigidly like this and did not absolutely under no circumstances want to lie flat. Meanwhile, I'm going to go ahead and start getting these channels in. I think what I'm going to have to do is because these are not going to be a good time to thread through boning channels once they are complete, just because they're very rough and they're not going to slide easily. So I think what I'm going to have to do is stitch down the top of each channel and then go through with a cording foot, which I actually now have. Thank you to the wonderful people who have sent me all sorts of fun little accessories and bits and bobs and supplies for this lovely lady. I think I have something now that will work. So go in with what's basically a zipper foot, but what historically would be called a cording foot, just stitches right on the very edge and put the feather bone under the channel, pin that down and then just stitch along that line. This sounds extremely tedious. I am not looking forward to this. There is every possibility that I will just nope right out of this situation and hand sew the bottom half of the channel. So as briefly explained, I'm only stitching down the top edge of each channel, leaving the bottom one free to add the feather bone in before closing the channels. This is going to require a bit of tedious explaining, but since feather bone is very dimensional, as in it's not flat like steel or baleen, that width has to sit somewhere. On the original bodice, the inside with the cotton channels lays perfectly flat, while the net layer on the outside was the layer that curved outwardly over the roundness of the feather bone, if that makes sense. So I'm pinning deliberately here so that the feather bone pushes the net layer outward while allowing the boning channel to lay flat on the inside, which I actually found easier to do with the outside facing me, pinning the channels sort of blindly underneath, but ensuring that the ridges created in the net layer looked taut and even. This was extremely tedious to do and took ages. I am near certainly positive that this was not how this was done historically, since this is definitely not a task conducive to profitable mass manufacturing. Sure, the channels on the original still weren't perfectly straight and even in spacing, but I began to think that there was some sort of machinery involved in this task because it was not a fun one. Before I could start stitching this bit, I first changed out the foot so that I could get as close up to the edge of the feather bone as possible. And from this point onward, I found it easier to sew over the corner of my cutting table to allow the bodice to curve off into oblivion, rather than forcing the bones flat. Feather quills, once set and hardened into a curved shape, are more prone to snapping if handled too abrasively. So as much as possible, I wanted to avoid bending it unnaturally. Again, not sure how they would have handled this historically as I'm not sure there were this many corner table options available in the production factory, but perhaps this method of stitching wasn't even necessary with whatever witchcraft was used for industrially adding feather bone to extremely shaped garments. Once the horizontal bones are all stitched in, I can then place the vertical channels that will hold the steels. There are 12 of these in total, one over each raw seam, as well as two in the middle of the side front panel and one in the middle of the side back. Okay, so I got about yay far, as in this far, but then I very suddenly remember that there's supposed to be this busk pocket, and if I sew down the boning channels, it's not going to make much sense to then stitch the busk pocket over top of the bone. So what I will not do is stitch down this side of the boning channel. I will pause for a second on this. I'm going to just stitch down this extra little busk pocket just at the edges here where it's supposed to be stitched down, and then I will go ahead and resume stitching the boning channels over top of this. That way, I can get my busk in without disturbing boning channels, disturbing busks, disturbing goose quills. This is all a very complex step-by-step process, but I think we are figuring things out. I hope we're doing this correctly. Then I can add the bones. The original bodice has two lengths of flat steel bones per channel, one bone that reaches all the way from top to bottom and a second that starts from the bottom but stops just at the horizontal row. These are pre-shaped with some light bending before being inserted into the channels, and I'm lining up each bone to mark where it meets the horizontal rows so that I know where to bend, since that is the broadest part of the curve on the bodice. Okay, so bones are in. I'm actually really quite pleased with this shape. The only thing is, friends, there is something grievously wrong with this back panel, and this was obviously something that I was suspicious of. I thought that once the stiffening went in that it would sort itself out. It has only gotten worse. I retook a pattern of the entire bust bodice. The back panel shape literally looks entirely different. It's not concave like this. It's actually convex like the rest of the panels to get that nice outward curve like that. She has sent me a preliminary picture of what this new pattern shape looks like. I'm hoping she's going to be able to scan it and send it to me when she gets home tonight. So what I want to do is, I think I'm just gonna rip off this back panel, undo this boning channel, undo these little bits of rails, which is really annoying because these were such a pain to stitch down. I do, thankfully, still have a bit of starched bobbin net left over that I can hopefully get two more back panels cut out of, and then just reattach the correct shape of back panel so that hopefully it won't be doing this. So I'm not going to film this because this is just annoying. Well, friends, that'll do it. This is the old piece, as you may or may not be able to see. This is the new piece. As you can see, the shape is vastly different. And my instinct was actually correct. See, this was the piece that I cut off the bottom here. It does actually slope up quite a bit on this new piece. So I actually very nearly got this on my own, but this, of course, is what was causing all of that wonkiness up there. I'm very thrilled about this. I'm going to go ahead and cut out new shapes out of this, get those attached to the bus bodice, and then we shall resume where we left off. That did indeed happen, and I have graciously not subjected you to the mess and screaming involved in restitching the feather bone channels with all three bones already in position because it was a certifiable march through the deepest bowels of hell. But we are now merrily pressing our one-inch binding with the quarter-inch edges turned under, then pressing those in half to form half-inch binding. This is then pinned to the edge of the bus bodice all around. At the top edge, however, all across the side back, front, and center front panels is a length of cotton tape that is trapped inside the binding and is anchored at the end of the side back panel to escape through a finished split in the binding at center front to function as the drawstring. This is a common feature of historical corsetry, allowing the upper edge to be drawn in ever so slightly so that it fits closely to the body and doesn't gape away. The binding is then stitched on by machine, the front and back caught in one go, which is a feat that perpetually leaves me in awed astonishment as it is not a skill I have ever proven myself capable of actually achieving. In fact, machine binding is a particular nemesis of mine, and after missing a few lengths of binding on the underside as I went round, was very, very tempted to just fell down the backside by hand, as would be sensible, pulled myself together and managed it passively by machine. Barely. Finally, well, not finally, but yes, finally, a length of cotton lace is added across the top for funsies, and I have replaced the synthetic insertion ribbon with a silk one, of course, like that on the original. Friends, she is nearly complete. I say nearly, however, because there is one more tiny little snag that we have hit, see, because in my infinite wisdom, when I purchased these metal eyelets, which are rather admittedly a foreign body to me to begin with, I purchased the eyelets that do not come with the washers that go on the back of the eyelets, so I cannot actually set these into the bust bodice until I have said washers. However, upon filming this video, we are currently on day three of quarantine lockdown for ye olde plague that is happening, and as of this morning, all non-essential New York City businesses have been closed, so I actually cannot obtain said washers. I'm about to go panic search and see if I can find something of this colorway and size on Amazon. Perhaps maybe I will be able to get something that will work on there. I have no idea. Hopefully Amazon will even still be delivering in the next couple of days. We don't know. So I'm going to investigate that situation, and if I am successful, you shall see footage of me happily setting in these metal eyelets, which shall happen several days from now. I did, in fact, find eyelets on the internets, but as of recording this voiceover a literal month later, they still have yet to arrive, and so I must unfortunately explain to you the theory of these eyelets, two of which are meant to go at the center front at the base of the busk, and two of which are meant to go on either side of the back, just between the horizontal bones, for lacing purposes. I decided to just hold out and wait until non-plague times to address this situation, instead of hand-sewing them in for the sake of video deadlines, since I know in the long run I will be much happier with a garment that is as close to the original as possible. And this busk bodice doesn't actually need to be worn until May of 2021, now anyway. So here is the busk bodice in mostly finished glory. Oh, and that busk at the center front. The original is a thin 7 8th 7 inch flat steel at seven inches long, which unfortunately is not manufactured today because apparently modern corset makers aren't reproducing busk bodices or something, but I did manage to find a six inch steel ruler on Amazon that suited this brilliantly, so that is what I've used for that. But how does this function in silhouette? With a bit of creative rigging, I did manage to give it a test wear in spite of the lack of upper eyelets, and found that it does indeed do wonders towards recreating that classic early Edwardian silhouette by building out that essential pigeon-fronted effect, and in turn, along with some corresponding hip padding, making the waist appear tiny. Although bust improvers of all shapes and designs were worn by all sizes of women, the advertisement that initially inspired this project marketed a garment similar to this to Solynder Women as an aid to improve a lacking bust shape, ahem, me, and claimed that it could be worn with or without a corset, and I can understand why. My natural waist doesn't require any reduction in order to achieve the standard Edwardian proportions, that is, the bust being approximately 10 inches larger than the waist, and the hips approximately 15 inches larger. This also fortuitously means that I now have one year later, finally successfully solved my scoliosis problem in recreating a convincing Edwardian shape with no pressure on my spine, winning all around. So as you may or may not know, this bust bodice marks the second part in a multiprocess series of my endeavor to recreate a Worth-inspired 1890s ballgown, a project which has been most kindly sponsored by Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of creative and business-oriented online courses to help you learn new skills and develop existing skills, or just generally explore your creativity. Whilst on lockdown, I have had a bit of extra time to take some new courses myself, including this course by Greg McKeown on simple productivity, because goodness knows I definitely needed some essential strategies for maintaining productivity amongst this very strange situation, and the strategies I've learned are ones I can develop to use even when life does return to normal. Skillshare is giving away two free months of premium membership to the first 1,000 people who click the link in the description box below to help you explore your creativity. After that, it is only around $10 a month. Anyway, before we move on to the actual gown, we still have a bit more underwear to tackle. So while I get to work on that, I shall wish you a merry rest of whatever hours remain on the clock within your respective geographical location, and I shall see you anon with some more historical sewing adventures.