This article is Part Three of a series dedicated to a corset patent by Daniel Kops from 1902, number “712,312”. The whole original patent is free to view online. My goal with this project is to create a corset from this pattern that is adapted to my body. The first article of the series described how the original pattern was adapted, see figures 1 & 2 below. The second article demonstrated how the corset panels were assembled, see figure 3 below.

In this third article, we will focus on boning and finishing the corset. I will start with summarizing and analyzing the relevant information provided by the original patent regarding boning and finishing. I did not follow the patent directions exactly, but interpreted them as creatively as necessary for a good finished corset.

Here is a visual reminder of the previous work done on this project:

- in black : the original pattern
- in red : my modifications

 

1. Boning

At this stage of the project, the corset pieces are assembled. It is now time to shift our focus to boning the corset.

1.1 Boning Material

Unfortunately, the boning material is not mentioned in the original patent document. Historical boning materials for this period include whalebone, buffalo bone and horn such as mentioned in the Au Bon Marché — Catalogue des Corsets dated from 1902. Nowadays, steel and spiral bones are our main options. This is why I am going to use a mix of steel and spiral bones for this project. If you want to read more about when to use flat and when to use spiral bones, please note that Jenni Hampshire provided a great comparison of flat and spiral bones, which can be found here. 
 
1.2 Boning Placement

In both the simplest Victorian corsets and in most modern corsetry, panels are pretty much vertical, and often bones are located on each seam connecting a panel to the next one. This is fairly obvious in this underbust from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) collection [http://collections.lacma.org/node/214134]. Boning placement is pretty straightforward in this case (i.e. along each seam connecting two panels). In Edwardian corsets, there are often diagonal seams, so boning placement is actually not straightforward. In this case, one must trace the bone placement on the corset pattern. Unfortunately, the boning placement is not fully defined in the original Kops patent, and it was not drawn on the corset pattern. However, from the cross section of the assembled corset (that was provided by the original patent), we get a hint on where Daniel Kops wanted to put the bones, see figure 4.

 

- In yellow on the figure: you can see bones at each side of the row of grommets,
- In red on the figure: there is one bone on each side of each of the almond pieces (aka panels “f”, “h”, “k” and “r”),
- In blue on the figure: there are two additional bones, one in the middle of panel “m”, and one in the middle of panel “i”.  

 

Now we have an idea about where Daniel Kops planned to put the bones in the hip area, but we still don’t know where to place the bones in the bust area. This leads to discussing how to figure out boning placement ourselves. Great information on this topic is provided by Foundations Revealed as different methods are discussed by Laura Loft in her article entitled "Planning Out Boning Channels”. She mentioned two methods to place bones in a corset:

• “Design on the body”: putting the corset toile (with a few temporary bones) on a human body and marking the future boning placement directly on the toile. As you can imagine, this gets tricky when making a corset for yourself...
• “Design on a Dummy”: putting the corset toile on a dummy, providing that the dummy shape is pretty similar to the desired human body measurements, and then marking the future boning channels directly on the toile.

For this method, I used a mix of these two methods. I started by putting the assembled corset inside out on my Edwardian dummy. I then placed electrical tape over the corset. I find easier to work with electrical tape rather than drawing pen lines on the fabric as I can remove and re-place the tape to fix my work as many times as needed without getting confused by numerous pen lines. Unfortunately my Edwardian dummy is not a perfect match to my body (the dummy's bust is much larger than mine), the consequence being I had to fix a few things in the aftermath. In particular, the initial boning placement (from using only the mannequin) created bad horizontal wrinkles in the back of the corset. That is why I added three more bones in the back (see figure 8 below). I will discuss this issue further in the conclusion section at the bottom of this article.

 

1.3 Boning Construction Type

There are different construction methods to create channels for the bones:  

• Single layer with external bone casing: “seams are stitched to the outside (i.e.: wrong side together), as the seam allowance are going to be covered by the exterior casings” as demonstrated by Jenni Hampshire in her “simple broche corset” article. This method is not really an option for us as we don’t want the bones to be along the diagonal panel edges.
• Internal bone casing: Laura Loft compared different internal bone case types here.
• Twill tape: the bone is sandwiched between a fabric layer and the twill tape.
• Coutil tubes: creating a tube from coutil fabric.

For this project, the boning channels are going to go across different corset panels. I didn’t want the bones to get stuck at the seam connecting the two panels during the bone insertion (one of my biggest bugbears in corsetry), so I will use a tubular tape.

 

At this point, the boning placement has been defined. The corset features marking lines matching the bone placement on the inside of the corset. Next comes assembling the bone tape on the corset:

• I basted down the bone tape on the inside on the corset (using the marking lines as reference),
• The tricky part was that I wanted to stitch down the bone tape from the outside of the corset as stitching lines are usually nicer on the right side than on the wrong side. That is why I created a basting line to use as a reference line from the outside of the corset,
• I then topstitched the bone tape in place from the outside of the corset.

I used this method to construct all the bone casings in this corset and then inserted the bones in each bone casing. The pictures below show the final fitting of the corset.

 

2. Discussing the Finishing Options

2.1 Exploring the “single layer corset” option

At this point, the outside of the corset looks almost finished. However, there are raw edges on the inside of the corset. In the case of doing a single layer corset, we would fold the seam allowance of each seam and do another topstitching line along every seam. Atelier Sylphe demonstrated this technique on her blog.  

2.2 The specific case of the seam connecting the bust area to the hip area

In our case, the seam connecting the bust block with the hip block didn’t look like the perfect candidate for the single layer method. The seam allowance of the hip block would need to be folded. But the hip block already has a lot of seam allowance from all the assembling of the many narrow almond shaped pieces. Folding the seam allowance and then topstitching would require me to sew through eight or nine layers of coutil (see calculation table below):

Bust block	The external layer	1 layer of coutil	X1
	The seam allowance	1 layer of coutil	X1 (if seam allowance is cut widthwise) or X2 if uncut & folded
Hip block	The external layer	1 layer of coutil	X2
	Seam allowance from assembling the almond pieces	2 layers of coutil	X2
			= 8 or 9 layers of coutil
Table 1. Calculating the number of layers of coutil created a the connection between the bust & the hip block if I make a single layer corset (i.e. with seam allowances pressed inwards)

And to make things worse, some portion of that seam is located directly on the waist line. I thought the bulk of layers would be uncomfortable for the corset wearer, which is why I decided to not to opt for folding each seam allowance (of the coutil layer).

2.3 Adding a floating lining

I decided to do a floating lining to hide any raw edges and get a smooth interior. Go to The Folded Seam or Welt Seam Method Article by Kim Ryser for some hints about constructing a corset with a floating lining.

 

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun with this project! I really like the corseted silhouette that I achieved by using only the original seams. I love all the control I have on the shape of the hips thanks to the numerous almond shaped pieces. I also feel that I found a successful method for constructing the corset. At first, I was afraid of wrinkles from the gores, and yet in the end, I didn’t get any wrinkles - at least not from the gores!

Things I would do differently:

• I delayed figuring out the boning situation, which was not wise. I decided only to put a few “temporary” bones in my mock-up. I should have used the mock-up as an opportunity to decide the real and final boning placement, test it during the fitting of the toile, transfer the boning placement back into the pattern and use the paper pattern to transfer the bone placement to the fabric pattern pieces (not assembled yet). I used my Edwardian mannequin that is too different from my body shape to be reliable enough for figuring out precise bone placement.
• The original seams give a lot of control on the shape of the hips. My only complaint is that there are actually maybe too many seams (in terms of shaping needs). I would like to try to simplify the hip area by decreasing the number of pieces. On the original corset pattern, there are four almond / convex pieces and four concave pieces. A starting point would be to do only three repetitions. In my opinion, it would save a lot of construction time but won’t affect the aesthetics much.
• A tricky part all along the construction of this corset is ensuring that the corset looks symmetrical. The pointy gores at the front require special care. Reinforcement flossing in a contrasting color would also emphasize any difference (in terms of symmetry). As Luthien Tyranea said: "I made sure to pay particular attention to the “points” of the gores so that the markings would help me sew them in accurately – this is important in this corset because a couple of millimetres difference on each side will make the corset look very asymmetrical.”

 

 

 

add