Sewing along
So, stays may take me forever, but looks like I can make some progress on a bustle pad. I'm hoping this will be like a 2-3 day project. (I'm sure it's actually more of a couple hours worth of project, but I'm slow sometimes.) Today I made a pattern and cut out the pieces. My pattern consists of two 11 x 12 inch squares and two 8 x 9.5 inch squares and a part of a waistband. The longer side is the width, so the waistband is a rectangle 3 x 12 inches which will have twill tape ties attached at the ends. All the squares have their bottom corners rounded off. I'm going to stuff them with a mixture of little bits of scrap fabric and fiberfill.
While my design is based off of the bustle pad in the Victoria and Albert collection, I actually used extant pieces in the Met Museum collection to find my dimensions, as well as a couple of period ads. None of these are the sort of bustle pad that I'm making, but I thought they'd do for general sizing. The ones that are on mannequins show that the width is less than the width of the hips. Many of the Met bustle pads had a length of 10-11 inches (see here, here, and here). And these two (here and here) said the semi-circle circumference was 19 inches, so I calculated the diameter (or width) to be about 12 inches. I also may have taken a ruler to the screen of my computer to gauge ratios and such. Most had a greater width than length but not by much. Advertisements talk about being 9 inches at the waist and anywhere from 10-12 inches in length, but these were generally the kind of bustle pads with padding and ruffles.
Hopefully I can get some good progress done tomorrow. Really there's only about 4 steps: sew the square pieces, stuff them, sew on waistband, tack together. Even I can do that without taking forever! ;)
While my design is based off of the bustle pad in the Victoria and Albert collection, I actually used extant pieces in the Met Museum collection to find my dimensions, as well as a couple of period ads. None of these are the sort of bustle pad that I'm making, but I thought they'd do for general sizing. The ones that are on mannequins show that the width is less than the width of the hips. Many of the Met bustle pads had a length of 10-11 inches (see here, here, and here). And these two (here and here) said the semi-circle circumference was 19 inches, so I calculated the diameter (or width) to be about 12 inches. I also may have taken a ruler to the screen of my computer to gauge ratios and such. Most had a greater width than length but not by much. Advertisements talk about being 9 inches at the waist and anywhere from 10-12 inches in length, but these were generally the kind of bustle pads with padding and ruffles.
Hopefully I can get some good progress done tomorrow. Really there's only about 4 steps: sew the square pieces, stuff them, sew on waistband, tack together. Even I can do that without taking forever! ;)