This is yet another one of what I like to call my “pleasure projects”. I don’t make my living by making corsets, which means I don’t have to take orders I don’t want to. I choose interesting project, delight in making them – and often pass the new techniques and knowledge I gain to my mother, who is a professional corsetmaker, has too much work and no time for experimenting.
This time I’m making a corset for one of the girls from our corset discussion board. Because I wanted some new corsets for my portfolio, I promised a corset at a very low price to the person who can catch my attention with something I would love to do. Yes, girls, spit out your expensive corset dreams and I will make them at a real discount! I wanted to choose one, I chose three. Three dream projects. Cameo, Dita and Magpie. Cameo corset is done; Dita in progress; Magpie in preparation. So, let’s talk about Dita.
The Dita we’re talking about is, of course, Dita von Teese. Lucie’s dream corset is inspired by this:
We didn’t want to copy the corset; Lucie just got enthralled by the combination of beige fabric and luxurious black lace. The corset would be a one piece overbust, not the set of underbust corset and a bra Dita favors for obvious reasons (tossing off an overbust is no tease!). The fabric we chose is a creamy (less beige than in the photo) shiny satin; for the appliques I didn’t buy a piece of expensive french lace, but a few meters of various lace trims, tulle laces etc. with different patterns I could cut out. Lucie left the embellishment completely under my baton.
So, the first thing I had to do was to sew the corset, obviously. I like making corset patterns. I don’t like cutting the fabric, putting together the layers, applying all the linings. I particularly hate setting grommets. But after all this injustice, here comes the crème de la crème, taking the ordinary boring corset and making it unique.
Only the busk and the back steel bones are in at this moment. The rest of the corset will be boned after I’m done embellishing.
The lace pieces were cut out and one by one sewn onto the corset:
The appliqués are symmetrical. A well done asymmetry is cool too, but this time it’s the good old symmetry.
