So last year when I had some time and money on my hands I bought a lot of books, one of which was Corsets and Crinolines by Norah Waugh. Once I read it I just absolutely had to make one of the corsets, but lacked the basic tools for the project…like a sewing machine, for example. But the corrugated cardboard the kind people at Amazon.com had used to package it in gave me a wonderful idea. Corrugated cardboard provides, in essence, exactly the kind of structure needed for making a pair of stays/18th century corset: it is pliable in one direction, but rigid in the other.
Obviously a lot of work still needed to go into the cardboard before it could be used to make a corset, but the basic idea seemed to be sound. At least to me it did…
The long weird process of making an 18th century corset out of cardboard to follow.
