If you want a bra done right... » All bra adventures

If you want a bra done right...

... you do it yourself!

At least that's certainly my plan. As I am both time rich and totally fed up with not having any options which I can even look somewhat presentable in without extensive alterations, and owing to the seeming lack of interest of the bra industry in actually working on bras which really work for very large busts, especially on very small frames, I figured if I can get a good result, I may actually spend less hours in the long run in researching and altering bras.

I'm not sure if there's a character limit on adventures, or if it's going to be better for reading comprehension to break this down into several parts anyway? If so, I'm quite happy to split it into parts.

NB: I've set up images in a private Imgur album, and I'm not 100% sure if they can actually be viewed if you aren't me. If someone could let me know either way, I can fix it if needed and remove this paragraph.

In order to start drafting a pattern, I've been using the articles on Foundations Revealed (http://foundationsrevealed.com/articles/bra-making), which I can warmly recommend for anyone who is interested in having a helping hand designing a bra cup almost from first principles. The free articles have got the basic stuff, but I bought a month's subscription, and while I'm not sure if I'll keep it up, at least one month was money well spent owing to the additional detailed articles on the site (although part of me now wants to get into designing corsets for myself which is a whole other kettle of fish and just as challenging and technical with just as little useful documentation on my body type).

Of particular interest to me is the article on 'plus size' (what we'd probably call full bust) bras, but there's a few articles on different things related to bras, including some on retro/vintage bras which show how to make your own bullet bra, which may be an area of interest for some of you sewing inclined ladies.

The first bit I did was take some measurements. I know the article suggests wearing a bra to take them, but all my bras are uselessly shallow, so I sort of fudged it a bit and put my breast in a somewhat suitable shape and measured the perimeter at the same time (this is definitely not a one person job!). I figured I'd just go along and do the shift grading exercise (creating the correct bra cup size by scaling up a generic size) as that was the logical progression from the information. Here's the basic cup constructed following instructions. (http://i.imgur.com/GtLY4Ai.jpg) (I figured out that the top line was actually a couple of mm short because I measured incorrectly with my new ruler, whoops!)

I did find out that A3 paper is woefully inadequate for the size of cup I was drafting, so I settled on some wrapping paper as an alternative which was larger. I suggest that masking tape is a really good idea instead of sticky tape as you can remove it more readily. Less damaged paper = less copies of a cup needed.

I didn't expect to get a wearable result from this, and so it wasn't a suprise when the result was totally ridiculous. I did some measuring and it turns out (which I'd sort of known) that the base cup is a hemisphere, and it's completely irrational to think that breasts are a hemisphere in large (or even medium for that matter) cup sizes.

I found out that it's really hard to test out the fit of paper cups on your own breast, so following a suggestion in an earlier adventure of mine, I decided to make a breast form out of rice and an old stocking. If you are like me, you are always putting ladders in pantyhose (I really wish I didn't), so you will probably have some on hand. Rice is also cheap and plentiful.

The first thing I did was measure my breast volume via displacement. I've done this before, but I know that my breast volume has changed since then. It's easy, but messy. I know I've seen some people suggest catching the water which you spill out in a bowl or dish, but I figure it's just as easy to let it run away and measure what's left. The result isn't going to be perfect because it's almost impossible to get a level surface that you don't mind drenching. Bathrooms and kitchentops tend to have a slope on them to let the water drain away. Still, it's close enough to get a bit of an approximation. I then made a note of the volume, because that was how much rice I wanted to fill my stocking with.

I had an old hold-up stocking, so it was really easy to stick it over the rim of a bowl to fill. (http://i.imgur.com/u5ENKDo.jpg) I'm not sure if it would be quite as easy with regular pantyhose, but I'd think it should still be possible. I found I needed to keep pushing the rice away from the hole as I filled, but presumably, not everyone would need as much rice and so would have less trouble filling. (The stocking looks kind of full here http://i.imgur.com/5xAnAzB.jpg, but it's easy to shift the rice to keep filling http://i.imgur.com/yYKgDvG.jpg) When I got the right volume in, I shook the rice down to the bottom of the stocking and then tied it off. (http://i.imgur.com/lcT6GoF.jpg) I wouldn't want to carry it by the top, but the stocking had no problems holding that kind of capacity, so I can't imagine that anyone would find they would have too much rice for their stocking. The tip for rice and a stocking was pretty good actually! While it's definitely firmer and slightly heavier than my breasts, it's good in that it holds its own shape and is easy to reshape. (http://i.imgur.com/JqeboKz.jpg)

Here's the paper cup with the breast form inside it. (http://i.imgur.com/dynoMcS.jpg) It barely fills the bottom 1/3 of the cup! It was impossible to photograph, but the depth is basically correct. So, in essence I needed to reduce the perimeter at the bottom, but still keep the height the same. Also, while I am a realist and realise that my natural breast shape is to a certain extent pointy, I didn't really want totally cone shaped cups. (The bullet bra article is completely seperate ). The article on full figured bras details how to do this to a certain extent.

To get started, I needed to have some wires. The basic article suggests taking your breast root trace and buying wires to match it, but buying suitable wires (those which are strong enough and the correct shape) is basically impossible from bra supply shops (I think bra makers supply carries some, but the shipping from Canada is truly prohibitive), so I decided that recycling was probably the better choice. The wires which I'm using came from my old 65L - Ewa Michalak » Sm Beżyk , which was too small in the cup and had seen better days anyway, so I had no issues deconstructing it a little for the purposes of bra science. There's also a suggestion about using 'Piano Wire' (actually not what they use in pianos, but a kind of hobby supply apparently) on the Foundations Revealed website, but I really don't have the tools here to work with wire. I may chase up this lead if I can get a bra I like and want some more as I don't want to pay for a bra so I can cut it up to get underwires.

Using the wires and my back measurement, I drafted a cradle. I haven't actually made the cradle yet, but I'm reasonably confident about the results there. I can't forsee any real issues. At the moment, I'm just recycling the cradle which I already had, as I figure I don't want to cut into my bra kit until I can get something reasonably nice, especially as I have a plethora of old bra bits lying around.

Back to the cups, the basic idea is that you want to reduce the perimeter of your cup to match the perimeter of the wires you have. By tweaking where you make the reduction, you change the shape of the cup. So, I cut my cup up into 4 seperate pieces (http://i.imgur.com/HyODTIN.jpg), and basically just made an educated guess to start with (http://i.imgur.com/3ZUUt7r.jpg). Testing it out on the breast form, it didn't look terrible (http://i.imgur.com/JP4ORfG.jpg), so I decided to cut it out in fabric so I could see what it looked like on. (http://i.imgur.com/PLivaHd.jpg)

Here's everything pinned together (http://i.imgur.com/8LGDXBT.jpg). This first guess still showed that the depth seemed to be roughly okay, but there's a lot of excess upper cup. My breast roots are pretty short, so even if I wasn't working with a giant cup, I may have ended up with this result. Here it is stitched together and tacked into the bra cradle (http://i.imgur.com/WurvTRc.jpg). I realised that I'd taken the left cup out of the bra and made a right cup, which is why the seams face outwards. Clearly not something to go into the finished model!

The first fitting I had on me had the apex of the cup up way too high, so I pulled everything apart, took some more out of the perimeter at the sides, and put it back together. It's quite challenging making changes to a 2D object to accurately reach a 3D goal. Maybe some people are better at this sort of spatial exercise than I am, but I've found it's a bit of a slow process to figure out the answers.

The second fitting seems to look a bit better in terms of apex height, but I've run into a couple of issues. I'd love some input!

Firstly, I'm really not sure where a logical strap attachment point is. The position which gives the most support and lift is having the lift point practially around my neck. (http://i.imgur.com/xP7f9Lt.jpg) (http://i.imgur.com/a07KFdm.jpg) . I just don't know if I can really put straps there though, because I think I'd end up in a situation like the one which prevents me from just buying 3 Enell bras and wearing them all the time; the cup will show through basically any sort of modern casual clothing. Moving the lift point out to a more 'fashionable' position compromises the shape of the cup and support (http://i.imgur.com/FV9PELB.jpg) (http://i.imgur.com/8SHSgGm.jpg). Is there a happy medium here or some kind of solution which I haven't thought of? Is the solution spend further extensive hours tailoring my own blouses and not wearing shirts and tank tops? (It's a possibility, but a pain)

Also, as you can see in the pictures, I'm finding that the cup is buckling and denting. I'd assume that this is at least partially a fabric choice thing. I don't think that just 'random old cotton sheet which I've cut up for "muslins"' would actually be suitable for anyone's bra except for perhaps people with quite a small bust, but I'm not entirely sure what sort of materials will be sturdy enough. Even lightly reinforced materials (like an EM bra with the push-up pads in for extra stability) buckle under the weight of my breasts. Should I be using a tough fabric (as in tougher than what you'd get in a normal bra supply kit, obviously tougher and with less stretch than the cotton), or should I be reinforcing the base of the cup in some manner, or both? Do people have any ideas for fabric choices? I don't mind getting something which is a little on the pricy side if it's going to work, though I'd rather be playing with things which are accessible. Can I make the cup stronger by altering the shape? Making a bra shallower obviously puts less stress on the cup, but it puts a lot more stress on the cradle and wires. My breasts try to shove wires inwards in a too shallow bra (yes, all my bras). Is there anything else which could be done to reduce the stress on the cup without fighting the shape of my breasts?

Overall, everything has been interesting so far, and I've already actually got a result which probably fits as well as anything I can actually buy (this is more of an indictment on the bra industry than anything else as it's not as though this is a great bra), but there's still a bit of work before I can get something which I'll be really happy with. I'm looking forward to being able to bounce ideas off people as I know there's a lot of collective knowledge here.

Filed under Bra alterations

Shared on Oct 15, 2014 Flag this