18th Century Stays - Part 4 - Finale

Hello everyone!

This is the final post for the 18th century stays, and I'll post photos of the completed stays at the end!
If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

This was also the beginning of my waking nightmare.

So, as I said in the previous post, I hate hand stitching. Well, hated is more appropriate...I'm more tolerant of it now, but still. When I started these stays, I had no idea how much hand stitching was involved with stays until I got to this point.

In the last post, I had just finished whip stitching the seams of the panels down into the stays, and I was surprised by how much the insides of my stays were actually starting to look like stays! I assumed I was heading in the right direction.

Now, I've also mentioned previously that prior planning is important. And I did not take into account how long the hand stitching would take. When I started the final parts of construction, I had about exactly 7 days to finish my stays before my living history event. Now this might seem like a lot of time, but I work full time, so I had only about 5 hours in the evening to work on these during the week. And despite spending almost an entire weekend just hand stitching, I still was finishing these up the night before.  And I'm pretty sure I injured my hand with my furious hand stitching.

So, a piece of advice - DON'T BE ME.

So here's the final part of the stays adventure!

After whip stitching the seams down, I decided to start stitching the tabs. In Koshka-the-Cat's tutorial for her stays, she used a strip of Ultrasuede to cover her tabs and bind her stays instead of leather strips. Ultrasuede is a type of upholstery fabric that is an artificial substitute for suede leather, and it's a little cheaper than actual leather (if you know where to look). So, like her tutorial, I found 1/8yd of brown Ultrasuede about 9" wide on Ebay for cheap. I also found a wonderful website called twilltape.com and bought 2 sizes of natural heavyweight cotton twill tape - 3/8" wide and 1/2" wide. I've added the links so you can check the website out - I got a 72yd roll of the 1/2" tape for $6.90, so not too shabby. I ordered these actually while I was still inserting the boning, so I didn't have to delay too long.

I took the brown Ultrasuede and cut it to the shape of all the tabs. I hadn't cut open my tabs at this point - the plan was to cut them once I had the suede stitched down.

I didn't leave any seam allowance - the suede is like leather when cut, so you don't have to fold over the fabric for a hem.

Lots of stitching, and a big headache.

In this photo you can see my running stitch along the edges of the 1/8" seam allowance on the tabs. I wanted to leave very little fabric so I could stitch the twill tape later. On the top edge of the Ultrasuede, I had to do a modified running stitch - I took the thread and stitched it over top of the boning, and then on the visible side of the fabric, I did a couple of back stitches along the stitching of the boning channels. It essentially tacked down the Ultrasuede without making messy stitches on the outside of the stays. You can see that in the photo as well.

Once the Ultrasuede was finished on both sides of the stays, I moved on to the eyelets. Now, I cheated here - I decided to use metal eyelets and stitch over them with button thread. I had an old pair of stays that actually had metal grommets with thread stitched over top. So I bought a couple of packs of 5/32" nickel eyelets from both Michaels and Joann's, along with an Eyelet hand tool.

In Rococo Atelier's final part of her tutorial, she mentions spiral lacing and spacing the eyelets out in a pattern that better facilitates spiral lacing. And when I first read this, I had NO IDEA what spiral lacing was. So, on to Google I went, and I discovered that it was, in fact, a thing. I also discovered that, through more research and a blog post by Festive Attyre, it was the most common way to lace up clothing in the 18th century. I also only wanted to use one piece of lacing cord for front and back.

So I marked the first side of my stays with fabric pencil and spaced them about 1inch apart, except for the last two - those were spaced about 1/2 inch apart, to create the zig-zag pattern and to create an anchor at the end of the lacing cord.  I was fortunate that my eyelets were small - the space I left for the eyelets was not very wide, and I would have to space the eyelets 1" apart in order to fit all the eyelets I needed.

Rococo Atelier also discusses how many eyelets you need - it seems to depend on the length of the front and back panels of your stays, and how far from each other you're going to place your holes. I decided on 1 inch distance, and my stays are ~13in long in the front, and about 15-16in in the back. So after looking at some extant stays, I went with 12 eyelets in the front and 14 in the back. She also has an illustration where the last eyelet is parallel to the top of the tabs. I decided to go a little farther than at the line of the tabs, after looking at Koshka-the-Cat's tutorial.

You can see here how I went from nickel eyelets to "thread" eyelets. You can also see the spacing I did for the eyelets, especially the last two eyelets. I button-hole stitched the eyelets with my button thread, and doubled the thread up to make it thicker.

As I was finishing up stitching the eyelets, I realized I'd forgotten to do something. In almost all of the extant stays I'd reviewed, they all had little strips of cloth along the seams of the panels. In Koshka-the-Cat's tutorial, she mentions that 'Before binding, I sewed a 1/8" piece of cotton tape to each seam.'

Well, crap.

The smallest cotton tape I had was 3/8" tape, and it was waaaay too wide for that. So, after cursing myself for giving myself more work, I took the 3/8" tape and measured it to the length of the seams, cut it, and then folded it in half, basting it along the length. Then I stitched it down to the seams...and holy crap was it painful. I started to wish I'd constructed each panel separately, and then whipstitch the panels together. But the result was wonderful - they really started to look like stays at this point!

Stays have the tabs stitched, and the cotton tape is sewn in. 

I was getting close to the end - I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, albeit a very looong tunnel.

Now it was time to bind the stays. I decided to bind the top of the stays first - considering there were less twists and turns. I used Ultrasuede here as well. I used 1yd of 45" wide tan Ultrasuede - I bought more Ultrasuede on Ebay because I thought the brown Ultrasuede wouldn't arrive on time. But it did, so I had double the Ultrasuede. Oops. I cut the tan Ultrasuede into 2 1" wide strips.

I turned on my Amazon Video in the background and set to work.

Like Koshka-the-Cat, I whip stitched the edge of the ultrasuede to the right side of the stays, and then folded it over and whip stitched it to the back of the stays, to give it the appearance of a narrow binding on the front.

This side of the Ultrasuede stitched to the inside is much wider than the outside.

This went fairly quickly - I like whip stitching more than other hand stitches, and since there wasn't too much coordinating over multiple folds and turns, it was easier to do.

Then I moved to binding the tabs.

This wasn't difficult for me to do, really - in fact, it was kind of fun after a while to bind around all of the corners. It just took a long time.

I took the 1/2" twill tape and folded it in half, covering the edges of the tabs evenly, with the cut end folded over to keep it from fraying. I then whip stitched it through the fabric on the tabs. This made it much easier to do, and folding the tabs evenly meant the whip stitching was almost invisible. I didn't pre-cut the tape - I just took the end of the 72yd roll and started stitching until I reached the end of the tabs, and then cut it and folded it over to finish.

Lots of hours, whip stitching, thread, and cotton tape.

This took time, and my poor hand hated me, but I finished, and damn did it look nice! The 1/2" tape was just wide enough to bind it without looking too wide on the outside. The narrower tape also made it easier to fold over the corners and curves without bunching too much.

The very last thing was to line the insides of the stays. I bought 5yds of some middle-weight linen on sale from Fabrics-store.com. It's a great site to buy all kinds of linen in many, many colors. And they have sales all the time. The exact linen I used was IL019 BLEACHED - FS Signature Finish, in case you want to look it up. It's an off-white linen that is super soft, and just the right weight to line my stays.

I traced the edges of my stays on the linen, minus the tabs, and cut it out. I didn't cut it quite as long as I wanted, as I found out, but I made it work. Once I did that, I folded over the raw edges and pined them to the inside of the stays. On the sides, I running stitched the linen to the boning channels seams. On the top and bottom, I whip stitched it to the Ultrasuede and the buckram. Easy peasy.

Here's the insides of the stays:

And here's photos of the front of the stays, all finished!

In summary, these stays are the most comfortable I've ever worn. I'd never made something that actually fit me before now, and to have the stays not only fit, but be comfortable, was a blessing. They also look really nice - much closer to extant stays examples than I expected. I am pretty proud of these. I adore the colors, and I can't wait to use the rest of the blue fabric in another project.

I learned a lot about sewing and costuming on this project, especially fitting and resizing. I became more proficient in hand stitching, which will save me a lot of headaches in the future. It also made me more confident in my costuming skills, especially with the more complicated aspects of costuming.

Another positive outcome of this adventure was the sudden love of research. I'd never researched costumes as religiously as I did for this project, but it inspired me to not only continue my 18th century sewing and costuming for my hobby, but also to read and research first before making historical clothing in the future. Now I've caught the bug something fierce, and I'm not stopping.

Thanks for reading! I hoped you enjoyed reading these posts as much as I did writing them! As always, comments and constructive critiques are appreciated!

Also, let me know if you have any project you might want me to try next!