Frankenunderbust
I stumbled upon this fabric while I was supposed to be shopping for other things and decided it would make a cute underbust. Itching to try out the Sam's Darkleather pattern, I got to measuring and drafting only to find out I screwed up my math somewhere and I could have fit an extra half of a person in my mock up. Rather than do the sensible thing and figure out where I went wrong, I had an idea. I grabbed the mock up of the TV-110 I had just made, put it on, marked a rough line of where I wanted it to sit under my breasts, then attacked it with the scissors. It came out better than expected, so I ripped apart the pieces, redrew the new top onto the paper pieces, cleaned them up with the french curve, and voila; underbust pattern.
The corset is composed of three layers: A fashion layer of quilter's cotton fused to medium weight interfacing which was then flatlined to a strength layer of herringbone cotton followed with a lining of black twill. The standard busk is 12". (Hooray for being long waisted)
I was originally going to go with internal casings, but I decided to experiment with externals to break up the slight dizziness of the fabric. I used the "piggy in a blanket" method as described by Ms. Bats in the comments here to contain the ten 1/2" spirals in the same twill I used for the lining. The flat steels on either side of the grommets are internal.
The gap is a bit bigger than I'd like, but I did lace this myself and after wearing it awhile I know I can go a bit tighter. This gave me around a 4" reduction. As usual, I used size 00 two part grommets.
I did do a double busk on this with the underbusk flats from corsetmaking.com and I'm quite pleased with the results. It seems to control the tummy pooch a bit better than with just a busk and despite how stiff they are, it's surprisingly comfortable.
Full view
Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out. Some of the stitches could be straighter, external casings aren't as difficult as they look and I'll definitely be using them more often. I did have some slippage when I was sewing them on so the stitches aren't equal on either side of the seam if you look on the inside. I did hand baste my seams together between the fashion/strength layer and the lining, so I probably should have done the same with the casings. It's not terribly off, but it's enough to irk me. There's a bit of wrinkling around the waist, but it's much smoother than my last corset and given the fabric pattern it's not all that noticeable.
I've decided to try my hand at pattern scaling for next time. I purchased this La Mode Illustree pattern and am going to give the high backed/shoulder brace one a go. I was going to make a bolero to go over my next corset anyway, so this kind of combines it all into one. I have it all traced and scaled, so here's hoping I didn't screw up the math too bad this time. Thanks for looking! ^^