This week’s primary project is a gored sweetheart overbust corset that will have a satin cover with lace overlay. The construction method will involve fully boning and preparing the core before adding the cover, so the boning channels will not be visible when it is finished. The customer has graciously allowed me to use her mock-up photos to illustrate this blog.

Shaping of the pattern is entirely modern, but intended to emulate the short-waist, hourglass proportions, and smooth bust curves of the mid Victorian ideal figure. The first mock-up version of the pattern is made to the customer’s natural proportions, with the bust starting at the underbust. The shaping of the gores gave it a very cupped appearance, and they were too small proportionally to look quite right. When the side of a gore is straighter than the curve it is being sewn to, it will turn outward from the body. There was some confusion on my part regarding the ideal shaping, so this gore shape was not what was needed in this case.

She had wanted extra gap in the back, but it ended up being a bit more gap visually than I had expected.

Otherwise, the only serious change I wanted to address was the pinching at the back of her armpit, which I thought was a result of the upward lift on the back two panels.

Armed with a clearer understanding of what she was looking for in her first corset, I made major alterations to the bust gores. I dropped the start point, and created a gentler slope up to the fullness of the bust. I also made the front significantly higher. In the pattern below, you can see that I left panels 4 and 5 separate, but extended the gore to cross both of them. Trust me, unless you are very comfortable with gores you DO NOT want to do this. It make smoothing the body shape extremely problematic, and you are more likely than not going to create a headache for yourself. On the mock-up photos, you can see a slight bulge at the intersection of the top of the Panel 4-5 seam and the gore. The flash from the camera makes it a little difficult to see, but it’s there. I didn’t realize that was going to happen until I had the mock-up assembled (which is a single-layer coutil garment), and I didn’t want to re-make the whole thing, so I figured out how to eliminate the bulge and sent the mock-up as-is. You can see the differences in the shaping between the mock-up pattern and the final pattern.

I evenly widened a couple of the back panels to shrink the gap in the back to a normal 3″.

To help achieve a more hourglass proportion, I added 1/2″ evenly around the entire bottom of the pattern in the hopes that it would not make the corset too long for comfort.

I evened the height of the back most panels with the armpit, and added a tiny bit of width to the right top of Panel 3 to try and eliminate the pinching under the armpit.

The bust was the correct fullness, but didn’t curve in quite sharply enough at the top. It needed more room under the armpit, and more room still in the back to eliminate all the muffin-top. The extra 1/2″ on the bottom combined with the lower apparent underbust created a much more balanced hourglass shape.

The final pattern has a bit more curve at the top of Bust Gore A, less curve out along the Panel 4-5 seam, and adds more width to the top of almost every panel. I also removed 1/4″ of width from Panel 1, to let the gap out to 3.5″.

This is the corset at it currently sits on my sewing machine table. Both halves of the core are nearly complete. Unlike with the quilted gore corset demo, the gores are added in sequence with the vertical panels, and all are stitched in as with the two-layer coutil corset tutorial. One half is photographed with the inside up, and other is the outside up.

Next steps will be to add waist tape, finish sewing each half into a continuous loop, insert the busk, and bone them.