Regency Short Stays Progress

I love the striped linen I found for these.
Hooray for the remnant bin!

 Ooh! I'm so excited! I am nearly finished with my first pair of Regency short stays and compared with the long stays, I have to say I am sooooo glad I made this second pair. Not only can I bend and sew while wearing them, but just from fitting them on, I can tell they are going to be way more comfortable. What a relief! I was really put off by those long stays and had to step away from the Regency thing for awhile until I just determined that I was going to make a new set of stays. Now I'm just waiting for my steel boning to come in the mail and then I can finish them up. Hooray! Then I can finally start making my dress.

By the way... I had started hand sewing the short stays like I did with my Regency chemise, you know, to be historically accurate. I was a little concerned with the strength of my stitches and then it was taking forever and then I said to myself, "Sarah, what are you doing?! No one is going to see these! Sew them on the machine for goodness sakes, girl!" I am so glad I listened to myself. haha! Not only did the sewing go much faster, I am very confident in the strength of the stitching. My only regret is that I should have used a cotton lining instead of the linen, because I used an older linen from some pants I used to wear and it was much stretchier than my new linen cover and the cotton drill interlining, so there is some gappage I'll have to work around. *sigh* Oh well. If I like these stays enough I just might need to make another pair!

You can see where I marked out where to quilt using my fabric pencil.

While at the fabric store I also found a very passable, lovely fabric, albeit polyester *ugh!*, for my 1940s dress. Finding affordable, era-appropriate fabric has been quite elusive, but they had this lovely, soft, heather-gray striped fabric suiting on sale and just the idea of pairing it up with a deep cranberry red hat or deep teal accessories was too tempting!

It looks a little yellow in this picture, but that's just from my desk lamp. It's a much more soft steely of a gray.