Corset making is an enjoyable and gratifying hobby, you can conserve money and add to your waist training wardrobe in addition to creating a garment that enhances your uniqueness. You can even turn your hand to making corsets for a living. While learning how to make a corset, specifically inserting corset boning (sprung or spiral steel boning, plastic is more for underwear or costume corsets) you’ll have discovered that it typically involves bone casing. This comes as a ribbon-like, continuous strip and is basically a tube of cotton. You sew it on to your corset, normally on the inside and slot your bones in. The other method is to use the seam allowance, as long as it’s wide enough, by sewing it together at its edge to create bone casing to slip your bones into.
Double boning with the strips of bone casing is easy, you use a double width tube and sew a line down the middle to create two tubes. If you can’t find double width you can just sew on two strips side-by-side, but I’d suggest using a wide ribbon. But what do you do if you if your after a double boned look without using bone casing? Well, if you wish to place two strips of your sprung or spiral steel boning along your corset pattern seams without utilizing bone casing then simply use the seam allowances on both the external fabric and coutil lining fabric as bone casing. There are two methods you can use, each gives a different effect with the stitching of the casing showing on the outside of the corset in method one, and the bone casing being ‘invisible’ in method two. Read on to find out how to use both seam allowance methods to make a corset double boned:-
For Visible Bone Casing
1. Take your corset sewing pattern, having sewn all the lining corset pattern piece together and all the outer pattern piece together and iron open the seam allowances on both halves instead of ironing to the left or the right of the seams. Now put the external and lining parts together and sew down the seam, stitching the covering and lining together. You now have 2 seam allowance flaps on either side of your seams. Sew down each side of each seam, creating two boning channels either side that are comprised of a pocket of seam allowance sandwiched between two layers of outer/lining material.
For Invisible Casing
2. If you don’t want your boning channels being visible on the outer surface of your corset then use this method instead. Iron your lining and external seam allowances so they will sit on opposite sides of the seam when your corset sewing pattern is put together i.e.. on the lining press seam allowances toward the front of the corset pattern and on the external fabric press allowances toward the back. Stitch the seam allowance together for each seam on both inner & external material creating your casings. Now when you make the corset up there will be 2 channels per seam sitting beside one another on either side of each seam. You can now slot your bones in and the casing won’t be visible on the outside of your corset design.
