Here’s How I Recreated a Real Victorian Corset | 1890’s Corset-Making | Historical Sewing

Hi everyone and welcome back! I am so so excited to be bringing you guys this video. So this video is going to be all about how I made my first ever historical recreation of an extant corset. I recreated this stunning black corset with light blue flossing that I originally found in Jill Salen's corsets book. I copied it right down to every last detail including the flossing and even handmade lace. This video could also be titled, how one can make a corset from start to finish and then not be able to believe that one actually created it. Sound confusing? It is to me too. Also every sewing project has its lessons for me and this project definitely challenged my sense of perfectionism with a lot of small challenges that came up along the way. Okay so at this point some of you might be feeling a bit confused. Catherine don't you make historical reproductions all the time? Isn't this what your channel is all about? Well technically the answer to that is no. What I'm defining as a historical reproduction is actually when I look at an extant corset from history and I really try my best to recreate it right down to every last detail. In the past all I've really done is possibly used historical patterns, possibly not, possibly just made my own patterns inspired by history and then not actually copied every last detail of a certain garment. This time I just loved the corset in Jill Salen's book and I decided I was going to challenge myself and try to recreate it as closely as I possibly could. So this means that not only is the pattern the same, but the fabric to the best of my ability is the same, the flossing is the same, the lace is the same, everything is just the same. The cording, you name it, the boning, everything. So where did I begin? I'm going to be diving right into all the juicy details about that but before we begin I just want to give you guys a short demo of my Victorian custom corset making course. Heard about my latest online course? Victorian custom corset making is a one-of-a-kind lifetime access online course which walks a beginner through the process of making a Victorian custom fit corset from start to finish. This course includes four hours of video, written instructions, photos, a year of included one-on-one coaching so I can help you work through any problems that come up during your corset making project. To learn more click the link in the description. Thanks for listening! Okay so how on earth did I look at a picture of an extant corset and somehow turn it into a real physical corset that fits me, that has all the details right? Well it's a long story so we're going to be starting with how I created the pattern and made a mock-up. Okay so in fact this was my first ever corset pattern that I created where I used an entirely new approach to making the pattern than what I've ever used before. In fact I've actually never personally known anyone who has made a corset pattern in this same way. Now I know I'm sure there are people out there who have done this but I don't personally know any of them. So first of all let's just briefly outline the three main ways that people go about getting a corset pattern. So the first most obvious method is to just go out and buy a commercial pattern. I think that's probably what most corset makers do and there's no shame in that at all. The second method would be getting a historical pattern from a book like Jill Salen's corsets book or Nora Law's corsets and printalins, which are scaled down patterns and so you have to usually manually scale it up and then you have to alter said pattern to fit your own body. Option number three for getting a corset pattern is using a book such as Mandy Barrington's Stays and Corsets which walks you through instructions to actually draft a pattern to your own measurements based on different historical styles of corsets. And this book is definitely very helpful if you can find a corset in one or one of her two volumes of books in the style that you want to create. Okay so as I mentioned before the pattern and inspiration for this corset came from Jill Salen's corsets and printalins book. In the past when I've used patterns from here I would just manually scale it up and adjust it to my body. This time I just really wasn't feeling like doing that. In fact I tried Morgan Donner's approach to printing it out a scaled up version and I tried this multiple times and it just didn't work for me. For some reason it kept printing out larger than it was supposed to be. So I decided to dive into a corset drafting approach that I've been wanting to try for some time but I was just too scared. And that approach is basically you have all your own body measurements. Now I already have my body measurements recorded in a spreadsheet and I have a bodice block drafted based on those measurements. So I use that as a base and I use my spreadsheet with my measurements and so then I looked at the corset pattern and I did a whole bunch of calculations which nearly broke my brain. And I basically calculated what percentage of the overall bust waist and hip measurement each given panel should be taking up. Sounds really confusing and it was really confusing and it took a lot of trial and error and a lot of doing and redoing of the calculations and my mind nearly broke as I said. But eventually I was able to draft a pattern to this approach. Now that only gave me the width measurements of each panel so for the vertical measurements of each panel I used my own bodice block that I already drafted to get the vertical like the placement of the bust, the placement of the waist, and the placement of the hip. So that's how I did that. Once I had the pattern I drew up my pattern onto printer paper as opposed to a thinner type of pattern paper and then I was able to do something really cool and really time-saving which was essentially making a paper mock-up. Now don't freak out I still did a fabric mock-up but what this paper mock-up allowed me to do was to essentially eliminate a very large error that was present in the pattern that I hadn't caught until I was trying to actually tape these panels together and I was like uh-oh big mistake. Whereas if I just gone to all this work and tried to make a fabric mock-up I essentially just would have wasted a bunch of time and fabric because it wouldn't have it would have just been clearly like not able to fit on my body. So after I'd made my paper mock-up I went ahead and I made a fabric mock-up using canvas fabric from Amazon and I actually didn't even use a busk I just did a zipper in the front and I used lacing tape in the back so it was very quick and easy and I made a couple changes based on the mock-up so the main change was I decided to make the busk gussets longer just to help the proportion because I realized that proportionally speaking they should be longer. Now another change I made was to the hip. I purposely like to have the hips in my corset fit bigger than my real hips because that instantly helps give an hourglass figure without having to reduce your waist so it's a Victorian little secret but in this case of the mock-up the hips were just too big it was just too much it almost looked like a peplum they were sticking out too much so I took off some width from there oh yeah it was a little tight in the upper back area so I added some width there as well and finally I took off a little bit from the back waist to allow for natural curvature of my spine. So the first place where I chose to deviate from the original corset was that the original corset's fashion fabric layer was black cotton sateen. Now black cotton sateen is available today but it's not as easy to find it's easier to find white cotton sateen than black I find so I decided to go with black silk instead because it has a very similar look and it was just easier for me to find so I used a nice thick pretty substantial silk from Dharma Trading Company. I really love that website just for finding more like raw materials of fabric especially if you want just white they have a lot of different types of natural fibers all in white. Okay so I created my pattern without seam allowance which is by far how I prefer to create my corset patterns. The reason for that is that when you trace out the pattern without seam allowance onto your fabric then you've instantly marked the stitching line onto your panel and marking the stitching line on corset panels is very very important because you can't just rely on you know oh I'm just gonna use a 1.5 centimeter seam allowance and then it'll turn out okay. No trust me ask me how I know um that doesn't work out usually with corsetry you have to be so accurate because just a couple millimeters off and that will multiply because you have so many panels and then your corset will end up not fitting you by like a couple inches so it's very important to be accurate here. So for my coutil of course I used black coutil for the strength layer so I just traced out each pattern piece and that gave me my stitching lines and then I added one centimeter of seam allowance to each of these panels and cut them out. So cutting out the silk was more complicated why was this? Because this corset contained a lot of cording pretty much every single panel had cording some more than others and when there's cording present the method of cording that I like to use basically uses up a lot of extra fashion fabric in this case silk because I have the top fabric basically curving around each strip of cording and of course that's going to take up a lot more surface area of that fabric. So this was not a case of simply cutting out my pattern pieces with a one centimeter seam allowance no I basically just like put my pattern piece down on the silk and I just cut like leaving a few inches around the top the bottom and the sides of each panel. I did buy enough extra silk so that I knew I would have enough to do this. The cording is in my opinion like the coolest part of this corset. To my mind when you see cording in a corset it instantly elevates it from looking modern to looking very historical because cording is one of those historical garment details that we don't really do anymore in the modern day because it's too time consuming and or we don't we no longer have cording machines like they had in the Victorian era. So interestingly enough this corset contains two different types of cording and I imagine that in the extant corset they were probably done differently. So if you look at the bust gussets on this corset you can see that they have cording and it's a very very fine cording and it covers up the whole panel. So I imagine that this cording would have been done by a cording machine which were readily accessible in the Victorian era and you could just buy like corset makers could buy corded fabric and that just sounds like a dream to me but of course that's not accessible to us anymore in the modern day. So I had to do this by hand well not by hand technically I was using my sewing machine and so the way I did this was by using cotton yarn and basically just stitching a bunch of channels with the cotton yarn in it. Now cording is a pretty complicated process so if you would like to have a deep dive into the process of how to do it my Victorian custom corset making course which is linked in the description goes into a lot of great detail about cording. I'll just say that the cording took a very long time. There were four bust gusset panels that had to be completely corded from top to bottom and it basically felt like a good day's work if I got two of those four done in one day of work. Now that's not solid eight hours of work obviously I'm a busy mom so like maybe four hours. It probably yeah it probably took me like at least an hour per panel and it was like tedious work. It was the kind of work where yeah you finish two and you feel like okay I'm done sewing for the day I can't do anymore. Okay so after I finished that it was time for the more structural cording that was in the rest of the corset panels other than the center front. So this cording was thicker as you can see and it was more stiff because it was basically replacing the need for the amount of boning that would normally be present in a corset like this. There was still some bones I just placed bones over each seam as the pattern of this corset dictated but other than that it was completely stiffened with cording so I chose to use a thicker jute cord which I believe jute is the same as hemp but don't quote me on that and so when I bought it I realized it was actually too thick for what I needed it to do but it was the kind of cord where it's sort of like a rope that's all twisted so I just untwisted it into three pieces and then I would use each of those three pieces in its own cording channel. Now they were all kinked when I untwisted them so I would get them wet and then just kind of like stretch them out with my fingers to straighten them out again and then I went ahead and I sewed these into the corset with the same method just with bigger channels and going vertically over each panel but this was a little more complicated because I first had to figure out where on the panel to begin the cording and remember I'm working with this big piece of silk so I have to first like mark on that big piece of silk okay where's the edge of the panel where's the center of the panel and then I had to make sure that I had no cording infringing on the area at the sides of each panel where the boning channels would later have to be placed. Okay so now let's talk about the busk and the eyelet. So I like to add my busk and eyelets in before attaching all the panels together this really just helps my morale because building a corset is a lot of work and really is easy to get bogged down in it so that's why I like to get the busk and the eyelets just like checked off the list because once you have that you're like it actually looks like a real corset I'm like halfway done even if you're not actually halfway done. So for the center back area with the eyelets I actually just used a fold over facing where I had cut the center back panels wider than I needed so I would have enough fabric to fold under and create a facing because you need a method of finishing that center back edge as well as adding an extra layer of fabric to the area with the eyelets and the boning. Before I add my eyelets I also just took a strip of coutil that I folded in half and I placed it directly under where the eyelets were going to be just to give extra fabric for them to bite into. So I went ahead and I stitched my boning channels which would be on either side of the eyelets and then I marked where my eyelets would be. I chose to just have every eyelet about two to three centimeters apart. I think two centimeters apart because that was what the original corset had. It just had evenly spaced eyelets all the way down they were about two centimeters apart. So then I went ahead and I set my eyelets. I don't have footage of this because I set my eyelets currently in my basement on a workbench on an anvil and I really only like filming in areas that are pretty and filmable and my basement is not at this point. So suffice it to say that I use a hammer setting kit that I bought from Farthingale's corset making supply. It's like an industrial hammer eyelet setting kit. It works amazing. I love it. Next to having an eyelet press machine which I think would be nice to get at some point, this is the next best thing. It is like leagues better than those annoying like eyelet pliers. I hate those. They've never worked for me and they hurt your wrists and to add the busk I first added my center front facings on either center front panel and then just inserted my busk in the usual way. Busk insertion is more intimidating. It's probably one of the most intimidating things I would say to a beginner when it comes to corset making. So if you would like a deep dive into that topic and just a guide through the whole process my Victorian custom corset making course linked below is for you. Finally after the loop and the knob sides of the busk were in place I just top stitched around each edge of the busk. Okay so all the cording was done and the busk and eyelets had been added so it was time to start attaching the panels together. So there's different methods of doing this. In the past I've done hand basting but I've actually found that pins work more effectively for me than hand basting. The hand basting tends to pull out really easily and then it's not even doing its job anymore. And in this case what its job is, what you want your pins or your basting to be doing is holding each panel firmly together exactly so that each stitching line meets exactly over the other stitching line. You don't want any shifting where this stitching line is further out than this stitching line because then you're just going to lose the shape of your corset. So what I do is I basically pin baste. So I stick my pins in but not like I usually would. I will stick the first pin in over the marked stitching line of the first panel. Oh and by the way before I did this I retraced the stitching lines using my pattern pieces onto the front the silk layer of the panels. And this was just on the chance that my panels had possibly shrunk during the cording process so I just wanted to have a double check of the sewing line. So I would stick a pin in on that first stitching line and then I would stick it into the second panel underneath and make sure it was going in and out of that one stitching line and then bring it back up of the first panel also coming out on that stitching line. So with every single pin you're sticking in you're doing this whole maneuver we were making sure that each stitching line is meeting up exactly. Stitching line to stitching line. Okay so before I get into just how I actually sew these panels together, let's talk about the first and most major thing that went wrong with this project and nearly drove me crazy and nearly made me think I would have to redo this whole thing. It was the first major blow to my perfectionism. So it had to do with attaching bus gussets into the center front panels. Now obviously this this basically probably is the most complicated part of creating this particular corset and a big part of the issue is that I totally forgot that there is a standard method of attaching bus gussets into a corset but for some reason like I knew that there was this method out there but for some reason I mostly associated that with things like regency stays where they have like these triangular go days and I just forgot that that was the method that I should also be using for this corset and that method is the method that you should be doing for this kind of maneuver is you should first press under the raw seam allowances of the opening into which you're going to be adding your gusset. Now I didn't do that I basically just attempted to do like a turn seam like I would do on any other seam and this was very very difficult and the first half that I did oh I didn't end up well like I first trimmed off some of the seam allowance because I did realize that it wouldn't fit at all without some of that seam allowance trimmed away but then when I sewed it in at the inner corner of the bus gusset it ended up having this big sort of not a crease but a wrinkle like a radiating wrinkle that basically damaged the integrity of the center front the center front edge was no longer wanting to lie flat it was wanting to curve and that is a major major issue freaked me out I tried to redo it I tried to fix it and really on this corset because it's made of silk it's just not something that you can pick out and fix like once you sew a seam you pretty much committed to it so yeah basically what ended up happening then is that when I went to add in my busk to this particular side I didn't actually have enough width to enclose the whole busk because the center front edge was wanting to curve so it ended up having to be like more narrow in a certain place and then in that one place there wasn't enough fabric to fully enclose the busk so the busk ended up extending partly into a bit of the busk gusset and this really bothered me it bothered me so so badly but thankfully it still worked out now thankfully the second half did turn out better even though I was still using my faulty technique but now I'll know for next time that whenever I construct you know this same pattern or a similar pattern that I should press under the edges first and then just simply add in the gusset by top stitching around so now it was time to sew together the body panels of the corset now thankfully this went much more smoothly I had pin basted it like I said earlier and so I was able to just simply sew right along where each one was and in this corset I really tried to just keep my pins in as long as I possibly could so I would just kind of pull it out by millimeters and millimeters as I came up closer and closer until finally I would just pull out the rest of the pin so that way I was gaining the full benefit of the pins holding everything together for me after these seams were all sewn I trimmed the edges very narrowly because these seams were later going to be enclosed underneath of boning channels and then I pressed them open over a tailor's hand okay so now let's talk about boning and boning channels for this corset this is where another issue came in that issue was first of all I'll preface this by saying that I'm I would prefer not to have to make my own boning channels because since this was a coutil and silk corset what that would require is basically basting narrow strips of coutil two narrow strips of silk and then pressing the edges under and this just sounded like a lot of work to me so I would far rather buy some sort of pre-made boning channel tape of some sort so went to farthingale's corset making supply website and I ordered a few things for this so I ordered black twill tape which is especially working for boning channels but when it came it ended up being too narrow obviously I had not ordered carefully enough and the twill tape that came was definitely not going to be wide enough to make my boning channels now thankfully I had also ordered some black petersham ribbon which I had intended for waist tape and for binding the edges of the corset thankfully the petersham ribbon was just the right width for my boning channels if I would fold it in half so I ended up having to use all my black petersham ribbon for boning channels and I had to use white petersham ribbon for the waist tape and we'll talk about the binding in a few minutes so I would first press my strips of petersham ribbon in half and then I basted them onto the center front panel because that placement had to be very specific because it had one of them had to curve quite a bit to enclose the bust gusset seam and then to go down to the bottom where it was supposed to be at so yeah that was a bit tricky and then it was time to machine stitch these in place this was so so nerve-wracking it felt the same as taking an exam in school like it was that kind of feeling I was like hunched over my sewing machine like sewing really slowly and just like telling everyone to stay out of my sewing room it was very stressful but I got it done thankfully it all worked out there were a couple scenes I had to unpick and redo but it's okay it worked out okay so now let's talk about adding the boning to this corset so as some of you may know I am a synthetic whalebone lover that is usually the only type of boning I will use even for the center back around the eyelets I just love it so much it's easy to work with it's flexible it forms to curves well it forms to your body shape in this particular corset I was just feeling like I wanted to try something different and this extant corset used steel boning now I wasn't sure if it was spring steel or spiral steel in hindsight some of it may have had to have been spiral steel but at the time when I was buying my boning I just went for all spring steel which is just the standard white flat steel bones now when I was doing my boning channels a problem that I instantly could see with this was that one of the channels the one that went over the seam of the bust gusset and then came down was very very curved and I'm talking about side to side curve the problem with this is that there's really only one type of boning that can deal with that and that's spiral steel because it can bend from side to side as well as front to back and the spring steel I knew was I was very skeptical if it was going to work or not so let's just talk about how I cut all my boning first so I went ahead and got my spring steel boning and I cut it to length using tin snip and I even used my Dremel drill for the first time to smooth out the ends and this was pretty cool discovering that that works pretty well and pretty fast well okay I inserted some of the steel boning the center back and right next to the bust and this was a great place for the steel boning not gonna lie steel boning really shines when it comes to applications like this next to the bust and next to the eyelet but next came the inserting the steel boning into the bust area and this is where the problem started so I inserted one of the steel bones into that very curved channel and I was able to get it to work fairly well by actually bending the steel bone in the place where the channel curves and that did help it not to twist completely sideways in the channel but it was still I could tell it was still sitting it was twisting a little bit it was wanting to twist because that channel was so curved and I was not feeling good about that because if a bone is just always a bit twisted in the channel it's eventually going to wear right through that channel and another problem was this was the most heartbreaking problem with the boning the steel boning was all of the beautiful delicate subtle curves that I had worked so hard to draft poured and sew into this corset were just being squashed and flattened out by this heavy duty aggressive steel boning it was just not working with subtle curves of this corset it was just like oh just too much so that was the thing that that was the straw that broke the camel's back that I actually decided to take out all that steel boning that I worked so hard to finish the edges on and replace it with synthetic whalebone oh the tried and true now if you're wondering how the synthetic whalebone worked in that very curved channel we'll say that ideally I think spiral steel would have been best in this channel but I didn't have spiral steel and I didn't want to make yet another order of course that making supplies and have to wait for it to arrive so I used my synthetic whalebone and it worked quite well and the good thing about synthetic whalebone is it's easy to bend into a curve and I think the more curve this bone has in it the more it will be able to lie flat and even if it is a little bit twisted in the channel at times it's less heavy duty and aggressive than that steel so it's less likely to be very noticeable that it's twisted or to wear a hole through the channel so I'm very happy once I got that synthetic whalebone into one half and I had the steel still in the other half you can really see the difference between the two and how those curves were just being splashed and straightened out on the steel side and then how they're being basically exaggerated on the synthetic whalebone side I even decided to experiment with adding steam from my iron to heat up the boning and then bending it into shape and this was really cool and you can really see the amount of curves this corset instantly got once I had the boning added it was really amazing to see even just sitting flat on the table it's just so curvaceous and delicious looking phew so we're on to the final steps of this corset which ironically there's still there's still a lot of work to go at this point so having used all of my petersham ribbon for the boning channels I had to come up with another option for binding the edges of the corset I wanted the binding to be number one attractive number two have a wider look of binding than I would normally do because I felt like that would just suit this corset better as well as allowing nice a lot of room for the decorative stitching that would later take place along the binding and thirdly I wanted the binding to be strong enough and substantial enough that there would be no danger of wear and tear happening and wearing holes through the binding over time so what I opted to do was to cut straight strips of silk as opposed to bias strips because bias strips are more likely to wear and tear over time straight strips are less likely and silk is pretty strong even though it's thin since it was so wide as well it would just be tougher over time so I cut straight strips of silk ran it through my widest bias tape maker and I had my binding ready to go this was basically the first corset I've ever made where I did the horrible awful prime of sewing the binding on completely by machine rather than hand stitching on the second pass like I normally do and I have no regrets about doing that because knowing the amount of work that was still to come after the binding I didn't want to hurt my fingers even more and just take even more time hand stitching on this binding okay so let's talk about the decorative elements of this corset there are four different decorative elements that go into giving this particular corset reproduction its look and matching the historical corset so those four elements are the lace the broidery anglaise lace the decorative stitching along the binding over the bust gussets the bone flossing and the cord flossing so those are the four different elements so let's talk about the lace so this was probably like the most crazy choice that I made in this whole project and that was to make my own broidery anglaise lace this was because I really just had such an intense desire to make this corset match the picture as closely as I could and I couldn't find any broidery anglaise lace that was light blue on black or even white on black all I could find was white broidery anglaise and black broidery anglaise and even if I had found one that was white on black or light blue on black it probably would have had a very different stitching design than the one in the book the one in the book has like scallops and it has these sort of star slash diamond shapes inside I just decided I would just dive in and do this crazy choice and try to make my own broidery anglaise lace and see how it went so I have actually recorded a whole video all about how I made the broidery anglaise lace I'm not exactly sure when it's going to be posted in relation to this video just be aware that that video is going to be posted soon and whenever it is posted it will be linked also in the description of this video so if you're watching this sometime after it has originally been posted just check the description or the card that will be linked okay so now let's talk about the cord flossing the cord flossing was what I did first because I just figured it was best to practice on something a bit easier so I started at the bottom the back and the cord flossing is basically like this cool sort of zigzag pattern with these stems and little flowers that come up and down from it and I used for both the lace making the flossing and the cord flossing I used pearl cotton which is a cotton embroidery thread and it's a single strand embroidery thread which is a it's like a thicker it's much thicker than normal sewing thread and I much much prefer sewing with this to the normal six strand embroidery lace that I've used in the past this worked amazing and I think it did a lot to elevate this corset and make it look more historically accurate I also added the decorative stitching to the binding over the bust gussets which is sort of like a vine design first I practiced a bit on scrap fabric and then I went to my corset but of course whenever you start out on your corset it's always going to look a bit wonky so that's another thing that challenged my perfectionism I was very tempted to rip out the first bit that I did and redo it but I didn't and I'm happy I didn't it's fine it works finally I moved on to the bone flossing now the bone flossing is like my favorite my favorite part of the corset and my favorite bone flossing that I've ever personally executed and I think having the historical extant garment to look at and copy went really far in having the flossing turn out well so the flossing is basically like these very tall flowers that come up the bone it looks like there's two leaves that come up and then a tall flower stem and I just love how it looks and in hindsight when I'm wearing the corset I think the long flossing and the fact that it's a high contrast flossing it's like almost white compared to the black corset it does a lot to just draw the eye and just whoa like just give the corset its beautiful shape I just love it so much now I'm just going to be honest completing the flossing for me was the point at which I would like walk away from the corset go to bed for the night wake up in the morning and look at it and be like oh my gosh who made that I made that no way like I couldn't believe it it just seemed like it had transcended me somehow like it had just gone beyond my skills and I think I honestly chalked this up to the fact that I was copying an extant garment this has really honestly taught me a good lesson of the value of just taking an actual extant garment and just copying it as best as you can not just using the pattern and getting the inspiration from it but actually copying it detail for detail number one it really challenged me and pushed me to new things than what I would have personally attempted just on my own and secondly just having a beautiful garment that I already knew was beautiful to copy it just helped take so much of the uncertainty and the guesswork out of it and in the end I end up with a corset where I literally look at it every time and I'm like I can't believe I made that it just blows my mind and I'm just like so happy with how it's the moment of truth how does the corset fit so that's the big question but first I'm going to talk about the lacing and a secret victorian lacing trick that I used for the very first time with corset and honestly I don't think I'm ever going to go back to the old type of lacing okay so I knew this corset was going to be a bit tight in the upper back just from a fitting that I'd done a bit earlier in the sewing process and that was what made me finally decide to try a new but historical lacing technique that I read about a long time ago in corsets and crinolines and I've always thought was a good idea but it just always kind of seemed a bit much and I just never tried it but the fact that I knew that I was going to need the lacing gap to be a bit wider at the top triggered me to try this so here's the lacing trick first of all let's talk about the way the corset fits and the way victorian corsets fit so again I'm going to bring up the idea that hourglass figures and historical silhouettes were not created just through tightening up a woman's waist and restricting her waist they were actually created through optical illusion and through making her bust if necessary and definitely her hips appear wider than they actually were so in my case what this means is that when I draft a corset pattern and fit a corset pattern I purposely leave the hip at least two inches wider than my own hips so I just I literally have been like sticking out further than where my real hips are at you can actually stick some padding into there if you want to or not but either way it gives you an hourglass shape instantly without even having to tighten up your waist at all but the problem with this can be with the lacing is that when you go to tighten up your laces using the typical bunny ears method you're pulling on the bunny ears to get the waist tight but the hips want to come down to fit where your real hips are that's where they want to go so as you're tightening up on the waist then the lacing gap at the very bottom of the corset is getting smaller and smaller so it's actually smaller than it is at the waist because the hips are trying to fit where your hips are at so that's always been kind of like a frustrating point of it but with this lacing technique basically instead of just having one long lace and the bunny ears in the middle you have three different pieces of corset you have one piece of lace that goes down to just above the waist and so this regulates the fit of the bust and the ribs then you have another lace that goes over the waist area that regulates the fit of the waist and then your third piece of lacing goes over the hips and this regulates the fit of the hips so basically what this meant is that I had three different sets of corset tails to pull on and so I would first be able to tighten up the top and get the fit how I want it in the top which was a pretty wide lacing gap especially since I'm just beginning to wear it you'd want to wear it looser and then I tighten up the waist how I want it and then I tighten up the hips how I want it and so it instantly just really easily gives you that Victorian corset without having to fiddle and get frustrated with the lacing not wanting to cooperate with you okay so how do I like this corset oh I love it I love it I love it I love it so much honestly it's like so pretty and so beautiful it's like the most beautiful garment I've ever made I've never been much of a like fuss and feathers type of sewer but this is the first time where I really put a lot of effort into not just the pattern and the construction and fit itself but also into the stylization the details the lace the hand stitching embroidery and it all came together to make just such a beautiful corset and it literally seems like it could be like a wedding corset like I just need to save it and keep it special I don't want to wear it every day and get it dirty um I love the fit of it like I said the the three lace lacing method instantly helps give it probably one of the most curvaceous Victorian sort of silhouettes than I've ever had before in a corset and I absolutely love love love how the bust fits on this corset it's probably like the best bust that I've ever gotten from a historical mid-bust corset before oh like the shape of it how round it is how it holds its shape even when it's on the table and I chalk a lot of this up to the cording going across the bust because it's kind of holding the horizontal shape as well as the vertical shape with the boning I just love how it turned out and remember guys if you would like to learn corset making like this I do have an online course Victorian custom corset making link in the description it walks you through every step of making a corset and it's geared for total beginners so I definitely recommend you to try that out okay guys thanks so much for watching the video if you enjoyed it give it a like or leave your comments and questions below let me know what you're working on I'd love to hear from you all all my social media links are in the description as well as the accompanying blog post for this video which dives into all of the details of the snake written down for you with photos so especially if you're planning on making something similar to this that would be really helpful for you to check out I'll see you all soon