Failed Mockup

[atherleisure]

Five years ago theladyrebecca made the De Gracieuse corset from 1876. Amy Galles, a friend of hers, had extracted the corset pattern from the original pattern sheet, blown it up to full size, and made a PDF of it. Rebecca was kind enough to share it with me. Here's her first post on her project.

I must have printed it out differently because with scaling set to "none" or "actual size" - yes, I tried two different PDF readers with the same result - I ended up with a corset that is 17" long at the center front and 29" around the waist. She came out with only 5.5" above the waist while I came out with 8" above the top of the hip gore, which is probably slightly below the waist. The hip came out to 40". The bust is hard to estimate because it was just massive on me, but it's probably close to 40" too.

Before I cut it I lined up the pattern pieces and measured where I thought the waist would be, and I came up with 26", which is only an inch over where I figured I would need it to be. That was not where we ended up. I guess I'm as bad at measuring corset patterns as I am measuring knitting! (And no, the mockup did not stretch. I checked it against the pattern after I tried it on, and if anything, I was a little inside the stitching lines when I sewed it together.)

I'm calling this mockup a failure. I'm reprinting at 85% scale, which should take about 4" off the waist and 2" or better off the length. Here's hoping that puts me in the right ballpark.

Comments

[mala_14]

I think the waist on this pattern is really tilted. I've seen a lot of people make this pattern up and it is very short in the waist and long in the front. I hope that the smaller scale works out!

[atherleisure]

You made this one up a few years ago too, didn't you?

I think you're right about the waist line curving across the pieces in a way that wasn't obvious to me. I somehow didn't realize that the pieces being so narrow in front really meant that the horizontal measurements had to go angling across the pieces a fair bit. Once I scaled it down, the length was perfect and only the bust needed to be taken in. While I love the idea of using a period pattern and padding it out to know you're getting a period shape, 4" of padding was just too ridiculous to contemplate. There were different proportions in the past too.

[mala_14]

I might have made a mock-up of this one, but never a finished corset. Glad it's working out for you! Four inches of padding is definitely too much. I sometimes wonder about period patterns and how much they were tested (if at all) before publication.

[atherleisure]

If period knitting patterns are anything to go by, they're probably not well tested. Probably the person who made it more or less tested it, but I don't think there was any such thing as a pattern tester. One thing I can say about this pattern is that all the seam lines match from piece to piece. That's more than I can say for some period patterns.

[marianme]

What a sizing bizarro.