Notes on a 10 year old corset

About ten years ago I was in a costume making class in college. Since I was already pretty good at sewing, I had my pick of what I wanted to do for a sewing project, and I was getting interested in corsets at the time, so this was a pretty natural thing for me to pick. For a pattern, I copied the 19th century corset out of The Little Corset Book and did a couple of fittings with muslins before cutting it out. The base layer is cotton coutil from http://www.farthingales.on.ca/ and the top layer is some sort of polyester satin that was in the stocks in the costume shop at the time. Sandy found me the black flat lace trim somewhere. The bones are white coated steel. I used commercially available single-fold bias tape to finish the top and bottom of the corset. I believe the grommets were also from Farthingales. I didn't follow any specific directions while making this. I made it 2 inches smaller than my waist, just as everyone tells you when you make one of these. It ends up being an underbust corset. I have worn it occasionally for the past ten years, for up to 8 hours at a time. It has been washed once, by hand. It is getting quite worn now, so I thought I'd post some pictures of where the worst of the wear points are.

It was not very long before the lace started to wear out and come off. You can see where it's worn out here on the front corner. The wear is especially bad on the knob side of the front:The lace has almost totally flaked off in small particles all the way down the knob side. Not sure why it's particularly bad in that spot, but the deterioration is particularly noticable, and started within the first year. You can see the place at the top of the corset on that side where the flaking first started, where I reembroidered it back in with some regular sewing thread during a particularly long read-through of a play I was in at the time:

One reason people tell you to make a corset at least 2 inches smaller than your measurements is that the corset will stretch. This certainly happened with mine, and the strain has created stress points at the sides of the bone casings. This is the worst one:

I have always had a particularly long lacing in it. After 10 years, the cord is still fairly intact, though not as shiney. There is some wear in the satin under the cord, and one or two of the grommets have started to pop:


When I made the corset, I assumed that a good way to finish the top was to bind the raw edge down to the inside with bias tape, so that's what I did. Unfortunately, that made the corset a little shorter than I wanted it. But, I sewed it down really securely, and it hasn't come out on its own in 10 years.

One drawback to binding the edge of the corset this way, and to using bones that were slightly too long, is that now a good number of them are popping out of the end of their casings:

I did a slight alteration to it when I had my internship at the La Jolla Playhouse. Whenever I would wear it, the bottom of the front would flip up slightly. The ladies there suggested I put a dart in the front to help simulate a spoon busk. So that's what I did here. It does indeed keep the front from flipping up:

So, I suppose the best advice I can give for people thinking of making corsets is to keep the top fabric ever so slightly larger than the coutil, bind the raw edges over the top with double fold bias tape, stitch a dart in the bottom of the front, and don't make the bones too long.