Day 2 of Bobbin and Ink‘s 2 day bra sewing workshop was a short visit for me. I could only be there for the afternoon however Susan of measure twice cut once who ran this class was a so knowledgeable, as always. Susan is both a friend, a great sewing instructor and an clothing industry expert.

I spent the first hour in class dissecting lots of future bra options and assessing the knickers I production sewed during the week. Now that’s a separate post in itself.

In the last hours I managed to figure out how to seal the ends of underwires I had to shorten. Yep that’s a separate post too.

I did cut out the lace version of the Mystic bra pattern by Orange Lingerie. This pattern i designed for bra cups. The instructions are good if you pay attention to them as you sew.

I wasn’t paying real attention to the instructions so I made a couple of rookie mistakes. The mistake you can see is I sewed the bra bands for the armhole part of the cups. It was only when I started working on #2 that I thought – you have got to be kidding me! I had to take a step back, breath and then prepare to unpick this test version.

Myra Lorraine has a very comprehensive and super helpful YouTube tutorial for the Mystic bra. Thank you Myra!! Myra is a brilliant, professional, wonderful and calm tutor. Her tutorials allow you to see each segment and that’s when I saw a few more mistakes on my first lace bra.

I was fortunate to have this bra cup in my stash to practice on. The lace, elastics and bra hardware were in my bra making stash. This is a specific stash because bras use so many different pieces.

On this tshirt version, I used a knit remnant and all the bra stash bits I could source from my sewing room. Now I need to make matching knickers using this knit remnant.

You guessed it. I have some bra cups on the way from The Remnant Warehouse to make a few more tshirt bras. The Remnant Warehouse has an amazing range of bra cups for bras, corsets and swimwear.

It took me 2 days before I tried on these finished bras because I was floored (tired) by the time I had finished sewing them and all the unpicking I did on version 1. Both bras fit so well, thanks to Susan’s help with bra sewing fit. I’m a partial bra fan so the Mystic bra pattern is now my go-to bra cup pattern.

I’ve moved the back bra strap curve so it is closer to my spine. This stops the bra straps from slipping off my shoulders. The bra bridge is slimmed so it fits into the small space between my b**bs.

All the pretty bits I had collected from last year’s lingerie subscription are not what I can use on a daily basis. The thought of charms falling off bras in the wash scares me so I don’t use them. I don’t sew labels into my clothes and there are enough hurdles to sewing bras accurately that again, I don’t sew in the labels that were in the subscriptions. I also avoid using fold over elastics where possible so all of these additional pieces are sitting there gathering dust.

After purchasing about 4 boxes I stopped and I simply bought the Christmas boxes and that’s it for me when it comes to purchasing subscriptions right now.

Full disclosure, while Susan is a great friend, I paid for full price for the 2 day workshop course as well as all of the patterns, fabrics and notions.