New day, even more topstitching.

[sinituulia@eldritch.cafe]

I have put in the boning! Honestly I hate this step, persuading the bones into the very tight channels always hurts my hands and I hate trying to contain the plastic prubble (plastic crud pulver crumble) created by the filing down of the sharp edges, wrestling the big roll of it and... Ugh. 😓
But yeah! Measured shorter than the finished channel, slipped into the boning tape, jiggled into place. Done.

[sinituulia@eldritch.cafe]

Oh yeah. And guess how many metres of boning I had to put into this very short corset for a rather small person, which is myself? Fucking almost five metres. Fucking hell. Corsets, not even once, unless you have 11 million moneys to pay someone else to do it!

[sinituulia@eldritch.cafe]

Relevant side note: If you don't want to put plastic inside your corset, there's always the option of buying individual length pre-finished spiral steel bones, which tend to come in lengths with 2cm intervals. You guess or draft in the best length for the pattern, buy those, and then fix them in place with functional embroidery called flossing. Spiral steel just works and feels different from faux whalebone (which can be very delicate and cut into any length) and will also rust eventually.

[laumapret@toot.lv]

@sinituulia
I'm having a corset made for me (🥳). I didn't trust random plastic bones and I wasn't sure how to find synthetic whale, so I went metal. Also I have had corsets with metal bones, it's ok for me. No metal bones in Latvian shops, I ordered from Germany. I'm tall and the precut bones where too short, so I ordered 2 rolls spiral and 1 roll flat. And a maybe 100 caps to finish. They didn't have cuters tho, but sewist told me not to worry, she'll borrow from her other work. (cont'd)

[laumapret@toot.lv]

@sinituulia
I mean, she is a pro + she works in a big sewing supply shop, why not?

Well... those cutters didn't not work! She went to sharpen them and the person sharpening them explained that no, it is not gonna work ever. Because random craft store cutters are softer than stainless steel corset bones. I'm not sure how she did it, but I'm planning to take leftover boning and visit a shop where construction tools are sold to buy myself a proper steel cutters.

Honesty found it delightful.

[sinituulia@eldritch.cafe]

@laumapret I've used spiral steel before and do put in like two flats per every "whalebone" corset, they're just visually thicker (I think the narrowest is 7mm and usually they're wider than that, you can get the whalebone in 3mm and 5mm and wider) and feel a bit different. The spiral steel is much grippier than the whalebone so it's harder on the hands if your boning channels are a bit snug? I've also done the big roll of steels, and while the cutting is possible with some decent hardware aisle cutters it's not so nice on the hands, and what I really struggled with was putting on the end caps nicely. There's a specific pliers for that you sometimes see sold, but that's even more tools. 😄

I wouldn't want to do it with a Karvinen in the space though, that's a lot of tiny metal bits for him to consume.

[valhalla@social.gl-como.it]

@laumapret @sinituulia I've bought some cheap cutters from the hardware store designed to cut steel wire, and they make a big difference in how easy dealing with spiral steel boning is, even if they are very much not top of the line tools or anything.

for flat steels I still tend to use a dremel-like power tool (or ideally, get somebody else to use a dremel for me :D ) to cut and sand down the edges, but that's helped by the fact that we do have such a tool at home for various other reasons

I'm still using the two regular pliers and lots of cursing (the latter is an integral part of the procedure, right?) for the end caps, because being multicraftual (in a multicraftual household) means that we have lots of multipurpose tools, but I don't do enough corsets to justify yet another single purpose one.

[valhalla@social.gl-como.it]

@sinituulia @laumapret very not Karvinen safe, indeed!

[sinituulia@eldritch.cafe]

@valhalla @laumapret The little end cap pliers make it look so easy and fast, but I've never tried them! But yeah, pretty single purpose 😅

[laumapret@toot.lv]

@sinituulia @valhalla
As I do not own any Karvinens, I was thinking that generic steel wire cuters might find some use in this household. Maybe my SO also needs to cut some wires or smth... but dremel seems a bit excessive. Then again, there are several HEMA people in my DnD guild, I think they had at least one dremel between all of them for swords. Next time I might ask them...

[valhalla@social.gl-como.it]

@laumapret @sinituulia not a real dremel, a dremel-like tool (bought for 25 € :) ), which arount here gets used mostly to cut various things for creative or repair purposes (PCBs, tubes and strips of plastic and metal, etc.)

but if you can get access to a shared real dremel that's even better!