#even the dragonkeepers bailed out

[daenysthedreamer101]

Not at all the dragonkeepers being like fuck this, this is an abomination we're not doing this

I'm sorry but I chuckled

[crowtoed]

Sybil’s 1740s Stays Build: Part 1, Drafting/Fitting

Tumblr is a WAAAAAY better format costuming posterity tbh, so here’s a bit of a slapshod build... log? (They’re like 2/3 done, whoops) for these stays. While I based my Molly Grue cosplay on an 18th c. silhouette, I’ve wanted to give a proper, historical set of stays a try for a while, doing as much by hand as possible to prove that I’m capable of making something even the reenactor crowd could respect. (INVITE ME TO JOIN YOUR WEIRD WOOL-CLAD CLUB) But I also wanted PRETTY UNDERPINNINGS, the kind of thing silkbaron features or something. Kind of thing that gets an ‘ooh’ represented by high def pics in a costuming portfolio. Ah, projects equally rooted in petty ambition and artistic curiosity... anyway... Since I’m working on a cosplay for ‘dragonkeeper’ Lady Sybil and drawing on a lot of 18th c. influence (and my Molly set are SUPER comfy) I looked for a historical pattern that I liked. Being a Ramkin, surely Sybil could afford a set of elegant, albeit indestructible stays?

Hot shit, my dudes. (From Norah Waugh’s ‘Corsets and Crinolines’, which I’ll actually buy when I can afford a copy. THANKS PINTEREST)

I’m in a weird place between straight and plus size. Honestly I could get away with a half-boned set of stays like what Redthreaded sells, but MAN I love the sturdy, exoskeleton-like, all over compression of fully-boned ones. As we’ll see later, the downside of this is that you need a metric crapton of boning channels and a similar amount of stiffening. This is also when I’d heard about that newfangled ‘artificial whalebone’ stuff the skinny costumers on the youtubes were aflutter about (I’m not just being salty, this will come into play later as mistakes are made). So step one: Drafting

Norah Waugh uses a perplexing non-gridded scale in C&C Underpinnings Factory (something that will make you want to kiss the feet of Ninya Mikhaila and the Tudor Tailor team). I could have had my photoshop wizard of a spouse blow up the pattern and through a little trial, error, and sharpie-ing fitted the pattern accordingly- but I’m a goddamned spite gremlin who needed a self-esteem boost in he middle of a pandemic. So I used math.  First I figured out the measurements of the original garment by cutting out the thumbnail pieces and using the scale legend as a ruler. I took my own waist and bust measurements to figure out the ratio of the original wearer to me and used that as the general equation to plot my pattern points. Fudging to fit my own numbers (slightly different waist-hip proportions) or to make the pattern ‘make sense’ happened, but I got over it. Humans struggling to clothe their meat suits and doing a little handwavey geometry in the process is historically authentic. I wish I could turn this in as very overdue schoolwork for math credit.

Another adaptation I made were areas that weren’t as boning dense to cut costs. In hindsight this didn’t help the bottom line much, but it was going to happen anyway since I changed up the angles of the original pattern (and therefore the channel layout). To make my life easier mocking up, I wanted to try the cardboard and duct tape stays method that made its way around the internet a few years’ back. I used 2mm chip board, a roll of the silver stuff, and some cord and.. it was an utter goddamned disaster. You know when there’s a hole in the bottom of a rowboat and you’re just bailing and bailing, but more water just keeps seeping through. Then eventually the whole thing floods and sinks, forcing you to abandon ship? That was my experiment with cardboard stays. (Note: Cardboard as an analogue for the stomacher panels, however, worked great.)

Then I switched to a sparsely-boned mockup cut out of bits of cotton duck/canvas I had lying around and cable ties. As you can see, there are Problems. The back’s too long, the tabs don’t spread out from my natural waist, there was a massive sideboob spillout, and the waist was too tight- creating that bowed gap in the lacing. Not great, not terrible. Fixed it in the next draft. Since I was feeling a bit confident and o-so zesty, I did v2 out of two layers of (again) sparsely stiffened canvas. If this version fit with minimal tweaks, I’d use it as the boned ‘core’ of my stays. I cannibalized the columns of grommets from v1 and basted them to the mockup to save time (and potentially my interlining, since I’d be doing hand-bound eyelets on the real thing). 

(Caption: I am absolute shit with a tracing wheel- nobody one ever taught me. Above is some semi-successful grinding.)

No pics because I was by myself, but it fit pretty well! In fact I only ended up replacing one of the panels since that side-boob issue hadn’t completely resolved. 

With the mockup canvases good to go, I went ahead and machined all of the boning channels. Then I steeled myself for the next stage: handsewing ALL of those channels through the nice outer fabric I’d chosen. Of course more mistakes were made, but we’ll get into that in part 2...