No Mockup, We Die Like Men

Several months ago while my sewing machine was in the shop, I got the wild hair to hand sew a set of bodies based on the extant effigy pair.

A friend draped some cotton muslin around me and I used that to sketch out pattern pieces based on the ones in The Tudor Tailor.

I used the pieces to cut out some remnant linen and some cotton canvas given to me by the same friend who did the draping.  Even though I had canvas at home and had thought of getting linen canvas, I have problems saying no.  It raveled if you even looked at it funny, so I added a line of straight stitching along any unbound edges on top of herringbone stitching.

Months of stitching 1/4" wide boning channels with linen thread and watching Modern Maker videos on YouTube taught me a lot about hand sewing even though I've been doing it since elementary school.  Double lines of stitching might have been overkill, though.  The contrasting colour might make any mistakes or sloppiness obvious (at least to my neurotic mind), but also makes for good teaching.

Multiple fittings were pretty unnecessary, but helped with my paranoia since this is the first time I've made a set of bodies in over 10 years, first 100% hand sewn, and the first plus-sized ones.

I had to seam rip one of the side seams and accidentally ripped the top fabric so I had to patch it using a scrap of selvage as my darning skills weren't up to fixing it.

For some reason, I'd thought that making bias tape required a lot of material and was very wasteful.  Luckily I was wrong and had enough of the remnants without any piecing.

Another friend gave me reeds leftover from a project.

No full pictures of it on me because I haven't finished the partlet yet and even with a t shirt on underneath it's... a lot.  When I sent her one such picture one friend asked, "good God, why do you need even more vast tracts of land?"