A Little Bit of Farthingales History

Every once in awhile I find a file I haven't seen in ages and I came across some pictures the other day of some rather distant past work....it does not seem that long ago, but it is.

Some memories...

This was piece that I worked on with Liz Gerds who built it - she's an amazing seamstress. We had some great collaboration while I was in L.A. it was there that I was introduced to Burlesque and we had several clients from that field of entertainment. I often did the cutting and Liz the sewing, we developed the designs together. This corset is black lace over white satin with exterior bone casings, a floating busk and beaded fringe that moved beautifully.

This awesome neck corset was made for Farthingales L.A. by the notorious Sue Nice of Sue Nice corsets - another amazing seamstress who was in L.A. at the time. This is just one of several pieces she did for us. Most of them matched with corsets we made or that she made. 

The corset above is one of several pink satin with black lace corsets that Sue Nice made for Farthingales. The lace patterns matched perfectly on all of them - Sue pays serious attention to detail.

This is just one of our production corsets - in the day when we made 80% of the corsets sold, and made them on the other side of the wall from the retail space. It was a great set-up - too bad the economy crashed in 2008. The photo was taken during a shoot with an up and coming musician and the white guitar was a perfect prop. These basic black corsets were made as waist cinchers, under busts, and over busts - they flew off the racks as they created serious shape.

Farthingales L.A. has now been closed for 5 years...hard to believe.

You can now find books on how to make corsets on the Farthingales website, we no longer make or sell them, but focus on selling corset making supplies.

http://www.farthingalescorsetmakingsupplies.com/Corset-books-s/1977.htm

Waist Cincher Corset is finished

The fabric used for this waist cincher corset is "spot broche" coutil also known as "dot coutil". It's the most durable of all coutil and I've opted to use it without any fashion fabric as it's very pretty as it is.  The bone casings are on the inside of the corset and I've bound the seam allowances to create some of them. Doing so meant there was no need for a lining. So this corset is made from just one layer of seriously strong fabric - dot coutil. Note the little pocket I added - it may seem too tiny to be of much use but it's all I need to carry a folded up bill or change.

 

I used decorative stitching to indicate some corset bone placements.  I edge stitched the seams in a contrast colour; more for a design detail than any necessity and I used a decorative stitch to secure the top binding of Petersham ribbon. The bottom edge was bound in the same Spot coutil the corset was made from. 

 

Instead of grommets I used black D-rings set w black rivets down the center back and lace the corset with nylon flat braid black lacing. The back includes a modesty panel made from the spot coutil.

All materials used can be found on the

Farthingales Corset Making Supplies web site

www.farthingalescorsetmakingsupplies.com

Blast from the past

I hadn't looked forward to cleaning up my many memory sticks but then I discovered photos of corset we made while in L.A. for various clients....some famous and some on their way to fame.

This was a simple black waist cincher and it worked so well with the white guitar - that I had not known the client had. It was one of those moments "Couldn't have planned it better."