corset materials

Written by i j

Tuesday, 06 April 2010 16:36

Today we come with the 2nd article about making your own corset, today we talk about…

Corset Materials

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Corset purpose is mainly to model the figure of the people who wear them, the problem is that our body tends to resist any change to change it’s shape of any non-natural form (exercise), therefore the main characteristic of a corset it’s the resistance of it.

Leaving aside the corset pattern (which you can find HERE and that it also helps in modeling the human figure) the most relevant factors for a corset are the resistance of the material used for creating the corset and the rigidity that we give to it.

Traditional materials:

Linen:

First corsets were made of the same material that most cloth of the epoch was done: Linen. It’s a good material for making corsets, why? Because it transpires quite well (which is really important), it’s strong and resistant and it’s able to sustain the making process much better than wool for example, it also can sustain constant washings which it’s useful for a cloth that it’s designed to suffer a lot of constrains.

Finally corsets were made of linen because linen was cheap (“Was” it’s different than “is” :P)

Silk:

There isn’t any evidence of corset made exclusively with silk, but there are evidences of corsets that used a combination of satin, linen or velvet and silk, for example Pfalzgrafin Maria corset was made of linen in the inside layer and silk and velvet in the outside, Maria de Toledo corset was made of silk and velvet and Elizabeth Queen had several corsets made of silk satin and velvet, satin and velvet were the most used materials for aristocracy corsets.

It can be done a corset with only silk? Definitively YES.

It’s a good idea? (In what respect to the corset itself) In deed it is, Silk transpires incredible well and you can dress it as a fashion cloth, finally silk it’s terribly strong (against what it could seem).

(Scientific curiosity: Silk is the only material present on earth strong enough to construct a tower that could exit the earth atmosphere without collapsing under its own weight, Iron, steel and even titanium can’t do it, only silk is able to do so).

The problem is that Silk it’s not cheap.

Modern materials:

Sadly for us, traditional materials although cool are terribly expensive, so usually we have to look for cheaper materials for making our corsets.

Cotton:

You can find it almost in every cloth shop (for not saying in everyone) in a pretty decent range of colors and its cheap, when you are going to buy Cotton for making a corset you have to think on the color of it, if you are going to wear it under your cloth (in contact with your skin) you should use white or pale colors (natural cotton colors) because otherwise you have great chances of it fading under the effect of your sweat.

This material it’s the strongest and durable material you can make a corset with (unless maybe silk), it can sustain repeating washings, its rigid don’t crackle and it’s cheap and easy to find.

Sincerely it’s your best option for taking your firsts steeps in corset making.

Velvet:

This is a beautiful material, sadly it’s not the most appropriate for a corset, the best option for velvet is to use it in combination with cotton or with any other strong material, the combination will be more resistant than velvet itself but will keep the velvet coolness.

This material has the advantage over the other expensive materials that it can be washed in the washing machine (something that you can’t do with silk, satin or any combination that has one of them).

It has the disadvantage that you can’t wear it under your cloths or the velvet will end being crushed.

You have to keep in mind that velvet it’s quite warm and it’s not exactly the king on transpiration.

Leather:

For depending what kind of corset or where are you going to wear it, leather could be the perfect option (at least visually) it’s also one of the strongest and the most resistant of the materials that you can put your hands on cheaply, it has some problems though:

The first one is that if velvet didn’t transpire quite well…. Leather doesn’t transpire at all, that create some obvious problems and some not so obvious problems: leather tend to accumulate sweat and there for it requires special caring after its use.

Secondly is that leather is quite hard to handle, in case you never handled leather I’ll inform you that leather is catalogued by thicknesses (from the one that you can stretch with your bare hands to the thickest used in mountain boots or things like that), the thinnest can be cut with a regular scissor and some exercise decently well but other than that you will require special tools that not everybody have.

And here ends our revision for corset materials, yeah I know there are other corset materials like vinyl or plastic, but I have no clue on how to handle those and I’m not sure if next article (the one that talks of actually making the corset) can be applied to them, so I think it’s better to leave them aside.

Hope you liked this article and hope to see you in the 3^rd article “making your corset” which will come in about a week or so if everything goes well.