18th Century Stays - Part 3 - Construction (cont.)

Hi again!

And we're back to the making of the stays!

In the last post, I started making the final product, and I completed all of the general construction parts. Now, on to everyone's favorite part - inserting the boning!

(Cue sarcasm)

Oh my LORD was this a pain in the butt. For me, it was THE most frustrating part of this whole endeavor. I'm pretty sure this part gave me the beginnings of carpal tunnel.

So before I start ranting about it, I want to go into how I did my boning.

I took 2 pieces of cut reed, put the flat sides together, and inserted them into each marked channel. If you remember in a previous post, I marked the channels so I only did every 2 boning channels.

Reed, reed, more reed...

So, fun side story, and by fun I mean infuriating:

As I was trying to insert the boning, I originally tried doing only one piece of boning at a time...and it didn't quite work. The boning would fight me the whole way into the channel, and I broke several, several reeds in the process. I had a couple of rage-quit moments for a few days. Then I re-read Koshka-the-Cat's post, and she mentioned putting 2 reeds in one channel. When I was reading up on Wm. Booth Draper's site, they also mention in their product page for 3/16" boning that it works best to place 2 reeds in one channel if the boning is skinny. So I tried that...and the boning went in much smoother.

Now, it was still tight as all-get-out. This was mostly my fault, because I probably should have stuck with 3/8" boning channels instead of 5/16" channels. And I had to push some of the reeds in with the pliers on my Swiss Army Knife so...in the future, I will try the 3/8" boning channels with 2 reeds FIRST before making the channels smaller.

So after doing the boning in all the panels, I still had to finish stitching some of the panels together. This was because the openings of the boning channels in the middle panels overlapped with the seam lines for the panels themselves (prior planning was not my friend here). So I did that...

I stitched down the seams for the middle panels here, after I finished inserting all of the reed in said panels.

I then took the leftover seam allowances on the top of the stays and I folded it over the openings of the boning channels, baste-stitching them down. This bound the stays so the boning wouldn't slide out and I could breathe a little easier. This was also the point where I decided to not have shoulder straps, so I cut off the excess fabric at the tops and made it strapless.

...And then moved on to the breast cross-pieces.

So, these were not mentioned before, because I didn't really decided on them until this point in construction (again, prior planning...). In American Duchess' blog post about boning patterns, she mentions that some stays had horizontal boning to add more support to the bust. And these pieces were often sewn in as separate pockets. Luckily, I had just enough buckram left over. So, I traced the top of the center front panel pattern on my leftover buckram, and then cut it down to about 5-6 inches long.

Two layers of buckram, and curved channels for boobies.

I drew in curved boning channels to follow the curves of the boobage. I cut the buckram to just long enough to sew into the outer edge of the second straight boning channel in the stays - the channel closest to the eyelets (you'll see what I mean later). This size made the pockets just big enough to cover the boobage without overlapping the lacing. Once I had all the boning channels drawn, I cut both sides out and stitched the boning channels together like before.

Ready to stitch!

Channels are stitched!

Then I put the boning in the channels, and they were ready to sew it into the stays!

Before I stitched these into the stays, I decided to sew a little design in the open channels of the center front panels. I came up with the inspiration from looking at a couple Pins of stays, such as this, this, and Koshka-the-Cat's 1780s stays. She has a lovely criss-cross stitching pattern in the open channels of the stays. So I got a little fancy and did that in several open channels with the cotton thread. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have for time purposes - I was coming very close time-wise to my deadline and I really didn't have the time to do this, but I didn't care. You'll see pictures of the stitching in the final photos. :)

I used the same button thread I used before to stitch each boob pocket. I first stitched the pocket into the seam of the center front panels. Then I stitched it into the seam of the vertical boning channel.

Boob pieces are stitched in along the boning channel seam (seen above). For this, I did a back stitch.

In the picture, you can also see where I marked my eyelets spacing.

The next step for this was the press again the seams for the panels, and then whipstitch the seams down. Examples of this are here and here, and is also seen in Part 3 of Rococo Atelier's stays tutorial.  This was also a pain, and the beginning of my hand-stitching nightmare. The one redeeming thing was as I did more, my stitching got faster and more uniform. Practice makes perfect, right?

When finished, they looked like this:

Seams are whip stitched and I'm starting to see stays!

*Please ignore the already made eyelets and tabs - I will talk about those in the next post.

Thanks for reading! Comments and constructive critiques are appreciated!