1: Firstly, a large piece of cotton drill was draped over the front and the centre-front (CF) marked.

I referred to the images on the patent and made a mental note of a couple of key points: the tip of the heart finishes just below the waist line, and the heart doesn’t seem to provide any shaping (and can therefore be drawn flat on the main CF pattern piece).

 2: I drew the heart in place and then gently pushed and pinned the surrounding fabric to get an idea of where the first seam needed to fall.

There will come a point at which the fabric buckles or ripples and cannot follow the mannequin/body smoothly. At this point, a seam is required.

 3: I sketched the first seam in place in pencil. This is half of a “shield” shape and the hip side-seam. I then trimmed the excess fabric off and clipped up to the sketched-in seam-line.

4: I also sketched in the top and bottom style lines. I decided to keep this piece as a sweetheart midbust, but have altered the lower edge as I have no need for the garter extensions.

 5: The second major piece draped in place.

Next, I “eyeballed” and sketched the side-back panel. This is where it pays off to practice “looking” closely, as a portrait artist would.

If you have ever taken life-drawing classes you will probably have been told that you can make a wonderful and evocative image with the minimum of pencil marks. It isn’t the number of marks you make that counts, it’s how accurate or how beautifully shaped those marks are. So spend time looking.

Make mental notes of reference points. Look at the patent again. What happens at the side seam? Is it perfectly vertical? No, it curves. If you were to overlay a vertical straight line, to which side would the side-seam curve? Where does it curve below the high hip? Where does it curve at the underarm? The more you look at these things carefully, the more natural and intuitive it will become.

6:  The third major piece draped in place. You can now begin to see how the negative spaces remaining need to be filled with those "shield" shapes.

I roughly drew each of the remaining shapes on the flat, trimmed and clipped their provisional “seam allowances” and pinned them into place.

When pinning the pieces together, it becomes apparent where you’ve gone right and where you’ve gone wrong. Perhaps a piece is far too short, or too wide? Simply trim it down to size or add extra fabric and re-draw your lines.

7: For simplicity, I made all the main vertical panels first and left those “shields” until last.

With the shields, I spent a bit more time thinking carefully. It wasn’t only about getting the shape right, but about considering how I would construct those seams at a later stage (more on that in Part 3).

Getting the shields to be the correct shape and scale was rather tricky, and required lots of pinning, sketching, trimming, and imagination.

Figure 7c – By pinching, pinning and clipping, each “shield” was altered to fit.

8: The first panel has a slight ripple in it here, but visualise the piece held straight and flat with steel boning and you can see how the Straight-front shaping is maintained.

Of course, even draping has its limitations, and it’s important to imagine and visualise what will happen later.

What will happen with the addition of boning, decorative fabric layers, pressure from lacing, and so on?

9: You can also see that I didn’t worry about the lacing panel.

Having draped the rest of the corset and without a back view in the original patent, it became clear that the easiest thing to do at this stage was simply jot down the main measurements from the second last panel to the centre-back, so that I could draw it out on the flat as I would for nearly any other corset.

10: A very rough sketch made simply so that I could write down the remaining measurements in order to flat pattern a lacing panel.

11: Having finished draping and feeling quite happy with the shape, I re-drew in all the seam lines using a pen for clarity.

12: The drape was then removed, and then the shapes were carefully unpinned and laid out, using a basic rectangle to ensure the pieces were placed properly in relation to each other on the horizontal and vertical planes. I may regret this later, but I didn’t especially worry about the slanted waistline as it seemed unnecessary to the project. Time will tell!

You can see the whole process here using the first panel as an example (each subsequent panel was copied out in the same way).

13 - As each piece was carefully draped (rather than cut from a bodice block) they already laid flat and did not require any further manipulation.

The baking paper was taped down with low-tack masking tape, just to hold everything steady whilst tracing.

You can see here how the central decorative heart does not provide any shaping, which poses an interesting question for once we reach the construction stage:

• Should that central heart be cut from a different fabric?
• Appliqued in place?
• Delineated with some bias binding as a quilter might do?
• I’m still undecided about how I’ll do it, but what would you do?

14: Regular greaseproof paper was used to trace the piece.

Here is the original piece of fabric and the traced shape.

16: Then the tracing paper was flipped back over and carefully lined up with my rectangular framework as neatly as possible.

The traced piece was again lightly taped in place, for accuracy.

17: I re-traced the lines again, which (as I’m sure you’ll all remember from school!) resulted in the pencil on the reverse of the tracing paper being transferred lightly onto the white paper.

Those darker lines mean our tracing is done! Very satisfying.

18: The tracing paper is removed and any parts where the graphite didn’t transfer are filled in by hand.

19: This process was repeated for each piece, then a centre-back lacing panel was drawn in using the taken measurements as a guide. The whole pattern was then inked.

Any jarring sections were smoothed out, as it seems to be true that a beautiful pattern yields a beautiful corset and often smoothing over the lines gives a more beautiful final effect than matching the form exactly does.

The seams of this pattern haven't been trued or messed with in any other way, so it will be exciting to see what happens with the toile and which parts need tweaking.