To go with yesterday’s sparkly pink tipped corset bones, I’m making a little underbust corset.
The goal of this corset was to make Jill Salen’s ribbon corset using ribbon the same size as that used in the original.
Problem: I couldn’t find fabric ribbon in 2 1/4″ widths
Solution: take fabric, cut it into 2 1/4″ strips, and bind the edges.
While I was scouring the fabric stores for ribbon, I picked up a cute black and white floral remnant. It went perfectly with some spotted fabric in my stash too!
How cute are those together?!?
I’d actually had my eye on the black and white floral for a while. It’s a gorgeous 100% cotton grosgrain, so soft and lovely to work with! The cartoon-y aspect of the flowers dissuaded me from using it for a larger project, but I just couldn’t resist the last half metre (and on half off too).
To make my ribbons, I cut 2 1/4 strips of the floral, and the polka dots. Then I cut the strips into the correct lengths, as I was afraid that if I made my ‘ribbon’ before cutting, the bound edges would start to come undone where I cut through the threads.
Floral for the fronts, dots for the backs, with black ribbon
Then I dug out some 1/2″ black nylon ribbon from the Nana stash (yay Nana!) to bind the edges with. I lay my floral and dotted fabrics wrong sides together, lay the ribbon 1/4 inch over the edge of the floral, and topstitched the ribbon to the floral:
The front and reverse of my half bound 'ribbon' strips
Then I flipped the strips over, folded my ribbon over the edge, and sewed again from the polka dotted side. The black thread on black ribbon completely disappears, so it didn’t matter if the lines of stitching weren’t perfectly on top of each other (though most of the time they were).
My bound edges, with, yes, one tiny mistake
Then I laid out my sides for the corset:
Ta da! Ribbons! All pinned out as corset sides too!
And then I decided that an all floral corset was going to get too busy and confusing, so I got all excited and cut extra polka dotted strips for the front and sides.
Polka dotted fronts and sides
Then I got super excited, and realised that I could use the ribbon to make boning channels, and have a floral and dotted and striped corset.
Dots on the inside, flowers on the outside, stripes on both
Pretty snazzy huh?
My ribbon boning channels
I think the lines help break up the florals, which is really important. If I had more for the floral fabric I would have gotten ambitious and worked out a clever kaleidoscope effect with the pattern, or at least arranged to slice through every single ‘cartoon’ flower, leaving only the cool spikey ones whole.
But I didn’t.
But I still think it’s a pretty fun corset.
Yep, pretty fun
All the pink-tipped bones are now in, so all I need to do to finish it is to sit down and hand sew down the loose ends of my ribbons. I’ll do that as soon as there is something decent on TV. In that case it might be a while, though they are (finally!) bringing Downton Abbey to NZ.
