Background research here, dress diaries here, here, here, here, here.
The stays were a good experiment and I don’t think they were a failure, but I’m not sure I’d make them the same way again. The cups are marquise/football-shaped pieces of a linen/cotton blend, hemmed all the way around, and whip-stitched into the stays. There are two rows of gathering stitches across them, as you can see. I used a bra to figure out the location and shape of the cup cut-outs, but (as you can also see) they didn’t entirely work. I think it’s because there’s no underwire – the front of the corset should really be more heavily boned to hold the shape. Rather than getting a completely defined silhouette, I get a kind of soft rounding, which is also period.
The stays should be smaller – I didn’t think to take a gap into account when I was scaling the pattern up. It’s not a big problem here, because there’s no reduction, but you just get a better fit with one. I could also have put in more tabs; drawn on the pattern, they looked larger. At some point, I will go back in and quilt all of the empty space.
Mimic of Modes 