All in all, a successful weekend
Mar. 7th, 2016 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotI still haven't put in that zipper yet, but I did set in the four gussets in my chemise ("I love setting right-angled pieces into slashes!" said NOBODY EVER) and felled the seams, and pinned the hem up; also scaled up and constructed the twill layer of some Regency stays. I think the hip gussets are a bit too short, but they'll be very easy to change, so I'm going to make the lining tomorrow or Wednesday - I tried taping the busk in place for a trial, but it just wouldn't stay stuck, so clearly I need to put all the channels in.
I also made fantastic brownies with cacao nibs sprinkled on top (they are way too dark for me to just eat them, thanks for misleading me, Brooklyn 99), and then a mushroom lasagne. Returned books I didn't get the chance to finish to the library, and I'm going to try to read books I have sitting around before getting more out, sheesh, why is this always so hard.
And I developed a sad case of the Man, This Is Impossibles over dating any corsets between 1810 and 1840, unless they have a curved busk, which I'm basically sure is from after 1830. I've torn down everything I thought I knew and now there's just ... nothing there but metal eyelets. OTOH, I'm starting to think that that's maybe the point, that during what I think of as the "soft corset period" the variation largely has to do with individual body shape. The standard narrative, right, is that they get a more pronounced waist as time goes on, but it occurred to me that someone who does have a pronounced waist or flaring hips is not going to be at all comfortable in a columnar corset, no matter what the fashionable figure is. If someone in 1810 had my body, her corset would still have to accommodate a reasonably serious curve and probably have some cording to reinforce it. And then someone now could look at it and say, "hmm, this looks like it would create an hourglass figure, must be 1830s." And the depth of the gussets - I'm doing some more experimentation, but the idea that they need to be really short to give the 1805-1820 lift just doesn't seem right to me, because they need to be pretty extreme-looking for my figure. We'll see, we'll see.
I also made fantastic brownies with cacao nibs sprinkled on top (they are way too dark for me to just eat them, thanks for misleading me, Brooklyn 99), and then a mushroom lasagne. Returned books I didn't get the chance to finish to the library, and I'm going to try to read books I have sitting around before getting more out, sheesh, why is this always so hard.
And I developed a sad case of the Man, This Is Impossibles over dating any corsets between 1810 and 1840, unless they have a curved busk, which I'm basically sure is from after 1830. I've torn down everything I thought I knew and now there's just ... nothing there but metal eyelets. OTOH, I'm starting to think that that's maybe the point, that during what I think of as the "soft corset period" the variation largely has to do with individual body shape. The standard narrative, right, is that they get a more pronounced waist as time goes on, but it occurred to me that someone who does have a pronounced waist or flaring hips is not going to be at all comfortable in a columnar corset, no matter what the fashionable figure is. If someone in 1810 had my body, her corset would still have to accommodate a reasonably serious curve and probably have some cording to reinforce it. And then someone now could look at it and say, "hmm, this looks like it would create an hourglass figure, must be 1830s." And the depth of the gussets - I'm doing some more experimentation, but the idea that they need to be really short to give the 1805-1820 lift just doesn't seem right to me, because they need to be pretty extreme-looking for my figure. We'll see, we'll see.
