This was the first corset I made, and is worn under my Spanish Renaissance dresses. I love this style because it's not boned stiffly (I've used cording in this one) and is more comfortable to wear. The back of the corset is one piece, as it is front lacing. It has shoulder straps which come over from the back and are fastened at the front of the corset with a eyelet and tie. It could be stiffened with things such as hemp cording, reeds, etc.

Corset: Two layers of cotton/linen blend - the outer in pink and the lining in white
Stiffener: Cotton cord
Lacing: Cording/strong ribbon


A friend helped me (a lot) with drafting the pattern for the corset. Once I mocked it up, it just needed a slight alteration in the straps and the curve of the top of the back piece.

The construction of this was relatively straight forward, but also very time consuming! Ididn't take any progress shots. First, I sewed the each fabric piece to its lining piece, along the sides only (not top and bottom), ie back to back lining, front left to front left linging, etc. Then I turned each peice the right way out, so the seams were on the inside - effectively bag lining it. (Next time though, I think it would be better to tack the pieces together at the sides, and treat them as one piece).

Note: when cutting out the pieces, I didn't cut the tabs, at this point. Once the boning was in and I have the corset on, it was easier to tell where I needed tabs to be cut.

Once the fabric and lining pieces were sewn to each other, it was time for the boning channels. I'd bought a roll of cotton cording, which I'd found at a newsagent, and is approximately 4mm thick. I wanted to have two strands in each channel, so it took a bit of experimenting with channel sizes before I got a nice snug fit, without it rolling out of shape. It ended up being the width of my machine foot (note! - if your machine has a switch where you can move the needle position to the left or right, take note of which setting you have when sewing your channels! I didn't, and too late realised that halfway through my channels, I'd shifted the needle... as a result, quite a lot of my channels were a bit too snug).

That aside, it all worked quite well in the end. From the picture of the extant corset (below), it appears that the boning stops about an inch from the top of the corset, probably to prevent a line showing beneath the garments where the corset ends. This is what I did. I sewed all of the channels first, then threaded the cording through, using a long length of thin wire with a loop at the end.

After triming off the excess cording, I hand sewed the back piece to the front pieces, by putting the right sides together and whipstitching over the ends with linen thread.

The next step was the lacing eyelets. I handsewed these - 26 in total, using a darker shade of pink linen thread. There is also one eyelet at the end of each shoulder strap, and two in the top front for the straps to attach to. Once that was done, it was just a matter of cutting the tabs in the bottom, then binding the entire corset. I used cotton/poly binding, in white. The pink binding was a horrible bright pink, so the contrast of the white looks a lot nicer.