Confessor Dress: Part 2

Day Two:

With all the progress I made the first day, I made almost no noticeable progress the next day.  Granted, creating the cups for the corset was quite time consuming, but still I felt a bit disappointed with my work progress.  For the cups to cover the bra correctly I cut out the front pieces of the corset pattern again, but this time I added 5/8 inch all around.  It turned out this was barely enough, as the cup size was larger than the corset pattern intended the bust to extend.  However, it was shaped correctly, so I made it work with some finagling.   I sewed all the pieces together, like I was re-doing the front of the corset.  Then I pinned it to the cup, marked with chalk the seam line, unpinned, and cut out the two cup pieces.  I sewed them onto the bra, rolling over the seam.  I then used the rest of the material  to cover the underwire section of the bra.  As the rest of the material was already shaped the right way (from cutting out the cups) I just cut out two semi circles, one under each bust, and pressed under the seams.  I attached it to the bra, making sure my needle didn't catch any of that underwire...this was rather difficult with the bottom already attached to the bra, it was really hard to fit through my machine.  If I ever make a corset with a bustier top similar to this, I will cover the bra and underwire first and then sew on the lining and facing.  

I then cut out two pieces of brown pleather to add to the top of the corset.  Kahlan's corset is mostly made of leather, a rather gray-green leather, but I don't like the idea of working with real leather.  It grosses me out a bit.  And pleather...is a disgusting material.  You can't iron pleather, it melts.  So to make a seam clean you have to hammer it.  This is fine, as I hammer all thick seams anyway after ironing, but the hammer makes slight stress marks in the pleather that are impossible to get out.  So- excuses aside, I decided to just use pleather in the utmost necessary parts: the top of the bust and the shoulder straps.  I sewed the edges under prior to attaching the pleather to the corset and very carefully hammered the edges flat.  Then I attached each piece to the top of the cup.