creating the 18th century Larkin & Smith stays pattern

dia duit!

i'm sure if any of you out there have gone on the hunt for the best generic stays for creating 18th century garments off of, you've encountered the gorgeous, strapless, front AND back closing pattern created by Larkin & Smith based off a real pair of stays from the era. and if you got that far and became mildly obsessed with making them, you probably discovered that the pattern is NOWHERE to be bought. i've not had my nasty toes in the costuming word long enough to know the story behind why the At The Sign Of Golden Scissors website seems to be under permanent construction, but it brought me many hours of trying to source the pattern by any means possible, unfortunately to no avail. what i did find, (which i'm sure many of you here did too) is The Merry Thimble's post on creating their stays using the pattern. being far too determined and incredibly bored due to a 6 month long art block, i decided i'd just make the pattern myself.

now, i do have a little education in pattern drafting having completed one year of a costume construction course that i had to defer this year, plus a decade or so working improving my art and drawing skills, so i think it's fair to say i wasn't going in completely blind. i'm not sure how i would have done it without these skills - but i'm sure there's someone else out there saying the same with a decade of pattern drafting on their cv - so just go for it ! if you want it badly enough, make it happen. and if it doesn't happen, sit down and have a little cry, cause at the end of the day we're all just advanced monkeys and nothing even matters.

just for ease for anyone actually using this to make their own pair of stays, i'm going to separate it into different posts (so you don't have to repeatedly scroll up and down the page - just open them in different tabs x)

i have two options available for all you beauties: 

1. make the whole pattern from scratch like a maniac (but have lots of fun and learn things doing it)
2. use the skills you might already have in scaling and resizing pieces to fit like you would from a Norah Waugh book (i don't have these skills yet because it seems daunting, but i know there are so many allegedly easy techniques out there for doing this, so give 'em a google mwah) using my sketch !

method uimhir a haon (1):

how I made the pattern, and steps for you to (maybe?) follow:

• now, this is the coolest thing i think i've ever found on the internet. an entire website dedicated to creating Elizabethan clothes. Elizabethan Costume Page has so many amazing resources - my new favourite being their Custom Corset Pattern Generator. if you know much about 18th century stays, you might know that they retain a similar conical shape as Elizabethan bodies (but from what i can tell, stays sinch the waistline a little more), so, using this generator with your own measurements should give you the perfect base for your own stays ! follow the steps to draft up your base.

•  now, time to add in the separate panels. to do this, i eyeballed the shapes of the different panels from The Merry Thimble's blog post while also looking at the pattern illustration. i did sketches of the shapes, over and over, until i felt i had gotten them down, then i attempted sketching them onto a scaled down version of my Elizabethan base (the green dotted line): 

• this can absolutely be skipped, but just to make sure that i wasn't completely mad in thinking what i had would make a pair of stays, i decided to make a tiny version of what i had sketched. i used curtain lining with a layer of cheap interfacing ironed on to stiffen it up, whip stitched the stomacher in how i thought it should fit, and stuck two bbq skewers along the front lacing sections. i just examined the piece by hand, seeing how the tabs worked and the general curved shape it created when pressure was placed on the waistline. overall i was pretty happy with it, but on observation, i didn't believe the waistline was going to be taken in enough, though i decided to just scale it up and see how it looked.

•  so ! the next bit was a lot of fun. i mean that jokingly, but also not jokingly, as i was so hyped up on pure adreniline from how far i had gotten without messing it up. i scaled up that bad boy ! i was going to do a step by step on how to scale it all up but i ended up with this monstrosity:
  

so i figured avoiding transcribing this would be best. anyway, after many failed attempts i got this absolute beauty (minus the curves inbetween the panels, and using the longer tab lengths):

 im so proud of her. i love her tremendously. the feeling of just raw unfiltered joy i got from getting to look at this after spending so many hours failing was unmatched. i didnt want the joy to end, so naturally i spent ages procrastinating the toile. 

• the toile. i flew through it. in fairness, i didn't have the boning to be able to put some into each panel like i found out i was supposed to have done after i had already started the real thing. but i did use my very handy and low cost method of popping some bbq skewers in the front and back to make sure they were straightened out - cause i knew that much was important. in reality, i probably did need those bones and just got lucky that things worked out for me, so i wont be skipping that step again:

overall, i thought it was pretty good. obviously there are so many buckles and folds due to the lack of bones in the panels.

 

i think the most obvious fixes that needed to be made were: the tab lengths really needed to be shortened, the front was maybe a little wide, and the waist seams were going to have to be sinched in more if i was going to get the silhouette i wanted. other than that, i quite liked the silhouette from the back - it was similar enough to the reference images for me to feel confident enough to just go for gold and make the real thing after i made a few small changes to the pattern. which gives me a perfect segway into the second method:

 

method uimhir a dó (2): 

• boom boom. i fixed up the pattern how i wanted it, scanned it up and here we goooo

 

i figured it'd be best to include both the clean version and the version with the sketchy bits underneath so you could see the details of the arm line and the little changes i made to it after i did the toile. but here she is, go absolutely nuts. just as in the other one, the green lines indicate the Elizabethan base, the panels that overlap at the front are the front panel and the stomacher (which will need to be cut on the fold). 

 

i really hope all of this helps. i'll be making another post shortly on how i actually put the beast together, so if you got this far and understood my poor excuse for instructions - go take a look !