Category: Thoughts

General thoughts and musings about any topic.

Project Updates A flatlay of a black bra with blue and teal peacock-inspired lace elements.

Bra-A-Month Challenge in Review

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A reflection on my 2023 monthly bra-making challenge

Greetings, dear readers! Today’s newsletter finally delivers on my long-promised review of my 2023 bra-a-month challenge. I’ll dive in to what I made, what I learned, as well as my plans for future bra-making — but first, an overview for those of you that didn’t follow along with the challenge and, maybe, don’t know exactly what I’m talking about.

Inspired by Emerald Erin’s Bra-A-Week and Evie La Lùve’s Let the Dice Design challenges, I set out in 2023 to do a bra-making challenge of my own in order to practice and fine-tune my bra-making skills. The thought of adding 52 new pieces to my lingerie drawer seemed excessive, not to mention the time involved in making a new bra each week, thus I opted for a monthly bra challenge instead.

A tan, lacy triangle-cup bralette on a dressform.
A flatlay of a sports bra. The bra is dark grey with red, pink, and yellow stripes, similar to what the cover of a VHS cassette tape may have looked like.

What I Made

During the course of the challenge, I completed a total of eight underwire bras (three AFI Exquisites and five LilyPaDesigns Lusamines), one non-wired bra (the Cloth Habit Watson), one sports bra (the Evie La Lùve Mighty), one swimsuit (the Edgewater Avenue Newport), and one corset (the Aranea Black Dahlia).

For the first few of months, I determined each month’s make using a set of design dice that I made, which were inspired by the ones Hannah uses for her Let the Dice Design challenge. These were useful for getting the challenge started, and helped me to be a little creative when deciding on each month’s make.

A flatlay of a red and gold lacy bra with black straps.
A black strappy bra on a dressform.

By April, however, when I had finished my first Exquisite and Lusamine bras (neither of which was a great fit on the first go), I decided I might get better results if I focused on perfecting the fit of a single bra pattern at a time. So I made four more Lusamine bras (diverting only in June to make a swimsuit for my July trip to Las Vegas), and by the last two I felt like I was finally getting a decent fit. I then spent October and November perfecting the fit of the Exquisite, which I think I’m even happier with.

A light pink bra with pretty teal and pink lace embellishments.
A flatlay of a neon pink bra with purple straps.
A dressform displaying a black bra with purple straps and fun polka dot lace elements.
A flatlay of a black longline bra with a deep v-neck and purple seam details.

I was able to finish each of these projects within the allotted month except for my December project, which was the Dahlia Victorian Riding Corset. This was a pattern that used to be provided free by Aranea Black, but is no longer available to download. I’d been wanting to make it for years and thought it would make a fitting finale to this year-long project. But, December being busy as it always is, meant I didn’t actually get around to finishing it until well in to 2024.

A grainy image of a woman wearing a pink and gold corset over a plain grey tank top and leggings.

What I Learned

One of the most important lessons that I learned is that, honestly, a bra challenge isn’t really a great way to learn to make bras, especially if you’re still working on tweaking the fit. In the first half of the year, I added a lot of finished bras to my collection that simply didn’t fit, when I would have been better off making toiles or fitting bands first.

I did, however, get a lot of practice using various finishing techniques which means my bras are looking very well-made inside and out, regardless of how well they fit. So that’s a plus.

A purple knit bra on a dressform.
A flatlay of a black bra with blue and teal peacock-inspired lace elements.

What’s Next?

While I did manage to get the fit pretty good on a couple of bra patterns last year, I’m still not totally, completely happy with the way the bras fit me. Even though my underwear drawer is filling up with more me-mades, I often still find myself reaching for my trusty Comexim bras. I’d also like a more reliable way to adjust a bra pattern to fit me without it taking me multiple versions, or even a method to start to make my own bra designs from scratch.

A few years ago, I drafted a bra using the Porcelynne method as described in her book, Bare Essentials. It didn’t turn out great at all, I think in part due to the fact that I wasn’t nearly experienced enough in pattern drafting or bra making at the time. Now, coming off of the heels of my recent experience in Victoria Werner’s Confident Patternmaking course, I’ve decided to try my hand again at drafting a bra pattern to fit my body. This time, I’ll be using Porcelynne’s method, as well as the method laid out in Patternmaking for Underwear Design by Kristina Shin, and the Full Course for Bra Pattern Drafting from Merckwaerdigh.

I’ll make each bra using the same materials, starting with a fitting band, and then full toiles, adjusting as necessary until I decide which method works best and adjust from there. I would love to have a truly well-fitting bra pattern from which to fill out my lingerie drawer.

That’s it for today, but I’ll be sure to update you all here as I progress in this new project. And I’d love to know if any of you are bra-makers, too! Please leave me some comments — it’s always nice to know I’m not the only one struggling through the process of trying to make a well-fitting bra.

Thoughts A stock image of a variety of colorful sewing tools.

Project Diary: The Beginning

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Ramblings about the fitting process

I have delayed starting this newsletter for a long time, unsure how to actually begin. Luckily, I was inspired by a recent opinion piece in the New York Times that has been making the rounds in the sewing community this week: Your Clothes Were Never Meant to Fit You by Elizabeth Endicott.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about fitting recently — it’s the primary reason why I began the process of creating my dress block. One of the most important lesson I’ve learned through this process, as well as from years of making my own bras, is how very nuanced and unique fitting is to each individual. It’s not as simple as a collection of measurements, because two individuals with the exact same measurements could have those measurements distributed very differently on their bodies.

I see this often in bra sewing. I wear a UK size 32GG, and yet I cannot wear a good portion of ready-to-wear bras in this size. This is because the size itself, 32GG, refers only to the underbust circumference and full bust circumference of a bra. But there’s a lot more to getting a correct fit — underwire size and breast tissue distribution (which impacts cup volume) are huge factors.

I ran into similar concerns when creating my dress block. I made twelve different versions of the bodice block in order to get a fit I was happy with, and even so, it doesn’t fit me perfectly (though I think the pursuit of perfect fit is impractical, given how often our bodies fluctuate in size). What struck me most was how even the subtlest changes to seam lines and dart points had a sizable effect on fit.

All of this is to say that, yes, it makes sense that mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing isn’t, and frankly can’t be, designed to fit the majority of people. But sewing patterns, even with their expanded size ranges, also have limitations. They’re still built off of a pre-determined base shape. For many, myself included, adjustments are still necessary.

I often see pattern reviews posted on Instagram that include a line along the lines of “this pattern fit me perfectly, with no adjustments!” as though this is a marker of a well-made pattern. In fact, all this means is that the reviewer’s body happens to be very similar to the block that the pattern was based on (or, perhaps, they are not as bothered by small fitting issues as I am). What disturbs me about this sentiment is it promotes the same wrong idea that the ready-to-wear industry has been pushing on us for decades: that we should be striving to fit into a mold.

But the beauty of learning to sew our own clothes is that we don’t have to fit into a mold. We don’t have to wear what everyone else is wearing, and we can make any adjustments we please — be they for aesthetic reasons, fitting reasons, comfort reasons, you name it. We don’t even have to use a pattern. This is why I’m so interested in learning to draft clothing for myself — so that I can really discover my own sense of style, free of what the rest of the world tells me I should wear.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. In the future, I’m planning to share more details on my making process, and not so much stream-of-consciousness posts like this one. These thoughts have been swimming around in my mind recently, and it helps to write them out here. What about you, reader? I’d love to know if any of this resonates, or if you have other thoughts on what you’ve learned while sewing and fitting your own garments. Leave a comment and let me know!