Construction Demo – Quilted Gore Victorian Corset – Part 1

This is a detailed construction walk-through of a Victorian-style corset with quilted gore piecing. The core is two layers of coutil on the panels, three layers of coutil on the gores. The cover material is peacock blue dupioni silk. The lining will be plain cotton. Boning will be spring steel flats, flossed in place.

The first part of this demo covers the assembly of the body panels, and the creation of the boning channels. The second part covers how to quilt and insert the gores, and how to edge the corset.

Jump to Part 2

The corset is made from my own pattern. There are six panels and four gores per side.

I started construction with the panels, sewing all the panels of each side together. The cover material was treated as one layer with the coutil. There is a seam at each corner of each gore, so I can use strong folded seams, rather than slashing into the body of the fabric to create an insertion for the gores. If you are using a pattern that requires cutting a slash for gore insertion, you should be able to follow the instructions given here except folded over panel fabric at the gore seams starts from the end of the slash rather than a seam opening.

I lock-stitched (or double-stitched) every seam, wherein the seam is sewn over twice. You sew down the seam, turn the garment around, and sew back over the same seam. This makes for a much stronger seam, which is very important because I ironed the seams open, rather than my usual treatment of folding the seam allowance to one side.

Next I sewed a contrast-thread basting stitch along each fold-line for the gores. If you are slashing for your gores, sew this basting stitch before slashing. The basting provides a clear marker for folding over seam allowance, and also serves to keep the cover and coutil layers from shifting during ironing.

As soon as all the basting stitches were in place, I folded over the seam allowances and ironed them in place. I had expected to slash the folded-over seam allowance in a couple places, but to my pleasant surprise the curved areas were on enough of a bias that they were willing to stretch smoothly into position when ironed.

I almost forgot to insert the waist tape, so it ended up being placed right before inserting the busk. For some strange reason my machine decided to fight back only while sewing the waist tape, so the stitches are painfully messy. Since they are just a temporary baste, I left them at that and continued with the busk.

Next I needed to secure the insertions for the gores. To do this, I pinned the two core layers together with the gore opening edges matched up. This is a perfect application for those bent pins I end up with by my normal habit of running over pins with the machine. They will hold thick fabric without distorting it, just like a really expensive hooked pin.

My gores were cut with a 3/8″ seam allowance, which I planed to trim to 1/4″ after quilting. Thus, I sew 3/8″ from the fabric edge. This is close enough to the edge to catch my seam allowance (which is 1/2″), but far enough that I will be able to snug the gores in between the two layers later. I left the bottoms of the bust gores open because I was not completely sure what boning pattern I would be using, and I might have needed to insert a bone or two through that space before finishing the outline of the gore.

Pinning of the front hip gore.

Front hip gore sewn, and back hip gore pinned.

Both hip gores sewn.

I removed all the basting, including the ugly-ass waist tape basting. The waist tape is now held firmly in place by the gore stitching, so I can get rid of that eye sore. The basting tape at the fold lines for the gores was easy to remove because I used contrast thread in a large stitch.

With all the panels together, the next step was sewing in the boning channels. The pattern for this corset is not a direct copy of any particular Victorian corset, and instead I drew inspiration from several different corsets. Most of them are chorded, but I did not intend to use chords. The boning needed to support the full height of the corset and the gores without pressing against the gores in such a way that the bone ends created folds, creases, or un-even pressure. To this end, none of the bones followed the seams.

The front panels of the corset will be held with a diagonally fanned pattern of bones. The left-hand panel as photographed below has all the channels sewn in place. I started from the busk and worked my way out. The right-hand panel shows the chalk mark for the outermost pair of bones. To make the mark I used a ruler and a rolling line loose chalk marker, like the kinds marketed to quilters.

This image shows the marked channel sewn in. I also finished off the bottoms of the bust gore inserts, because I did not need them open to insert bones.

I used pins to hold the layers together at the seams, and then sewed boning channels straight up the side. In this part of the corset I decided to use a 1/2″ bone, couched on either side by 1/4″ bones.

The boning at the back for the grommets is totally standard. It’s a 1/4″ bone to the outside edge, a 5/8″ gap for the size #0 grommets, and another 1/4″ bone. The one thing that bears mentioning is the little bit of black you can see sticking out of the grommet area at the top and bottom on both sides. I sew a wide strip of twill tape into the corset along with the boning channels. This helps to re-enforce the grommets and is extra insurance they won’t pop free under stress.

The last two boning channels are two small bones facing diagonally up from the grommet bones. These are a common feature on historic corsets, which helps to keep the high back upright.