Shapewear. Do you bother wearing shapewear? Would you make shapewear? Well it was a slow news day when this article came up last week. So I reacted to this ‘celebrity secret’ in a sewing way.
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| Control brief with tummy panel on the left and shape shorts on the right |
If you’ve sewn activewear, shapewear is easy enough to achieve. Jalie 2572 has been in my pattern stash for a while so as I’m sewing a bunch of activewear at the moment, I thought my current sewing skills could handle sewing shapewear.
I was curious about the techniques and fit so while these test pieces look ‘questionable’, they do fit. I used size ‘T’. This control brief has a stretchy powermesh body and a more stable power mesh tummy control panel. I follow Jalie’s suggested seam sewing method and it worked wonderfully. I only needed a normal sewing machine to finish these pieces.
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| Tested the shape shorts with some stash fabric. |
The shaping shorts are made from poly/lycra that was in my stash and swimwear elastic. So now I need to get the right FOE picot elastic, powermesh and matching lace in nude and black colours to take this to a more useable/wearable make (on my sewing notion shopping list). These patterns don’t take long to sew together.
Mum used to wear ‘steppings’ or a girdle when she was a social butterfly in the 60s and 70s. Now we call these ‘shapewear’.
…Then the day after I made these two test pieces, I felt compelled to make the waist cincher in the stash poly/lycra fabric. No boning sew into it but I did sew on the tummy panel. Just a straight size T with a firmer tummy control powermesh panel.
So I then wore my Burda wrap dress to work with the waist cincher on.
At the beginning of the day, the base of the waist cincher kept rolling upwards so I placed my ‘hose’ over the top of the cincher and the ‘rolling up’ stopped. All day I had this cheeky smile on my face because I didn’t let a soul know what I was testing/wearing. I mean – would you? #Not likely.
At the end of the day my torso and lower back felt well supported I could still eat normally and breath normally.
So my notion shopping list has now expanded to include boning.
And this all started because of that news item.
