Staying in

This week I am mostly making mid-C17th stays. They aren't accurate re-creation stays, because I am cheating and machine-sewing them. The shape and pattern are as accurate as I can make them, and the linen is unbleached 24-count with rigid steel 'bones' down the centre-front but the boning is mostly Rigilene and the thread is polyester.
Part 17th century and part 21st century.

Compromising stays, so to speak...


Above is the card template, made from Drea Leed's Custom Corset Pattern Generator. It seems pretty good so far although too broad across the top so the back lacing-edges meet; I'll need to lop some off and re-do the boning-lines once I've cut the lacing-edges.


Here, above, is the bottom left edge; at the left of the picture is the centre-front of the stays, and you can see in the main part of the picture the three tabs, as yet uncut; there will be a line of boning from top edge to bottom edge at each side of the tabs, keeping the stays from digging in at the waist. Apparently.

Here are the stays half-made. Centre-front at left, lacing-edge (ie centre-back) at right, uncut tabs at bottom.

THH

First, catch your hare...

... as Mrs. Beeton may or may not have written. I must check that some time or other. The first posting in an occasional weblog about ways and means of running a household in the historical past; ranging from hand-sewing clothes to scrubbing floors, from hierarchical practices of a stately home to managing in a tent.

I think that's about it for now. I hope to add photographs at some point, either of Things Wot I Made or of Things Wot I Done. And lots and lots of references. Oodles of those. You can never have too many good reliable sources.

And an occasional borrowed old image like that above linked from cartoonstock.com. A classic Punch-esque comment!

Thankyou for your time, ladles and jellyspoons,

The Historical* Housekeeper

*and, occasionally, hysterical...