Distracting Myself with 100+ Corset Patterns

So you know how I had planned to dedicate a month to rebuilding my Victorian undies wardrobe? Yeah, that didn't quite happen according to plan. I did start a few pieces, but I got a little overwhelmed, started looking up patterns in De Gracieuse, and then I got really distracted by tracing out patterns from the magazine that I wanted to use.

And while I was browsing through those hundreds of issues of high Victorian eye candy, I somehow went from "I'm going to pull out some of these corset patterns to use for this project" to "I'm going to pull out ALL of the corset patterns so I don't have to search for them again in the future!"

So, for the past few weeks, that's what I've been doing. For six or so hours each day, I've searched every issue for patterns, scaled them up, and traced them out neatly in Photoshop. 

If you're unfamiliar with De Gracieuse, it's a Dutch-language magazine that was published from 1862 to 1936. It was Holland's version of La Mode Illustree, and is full of wonderful fashion illustrations and plates, and best of all, every issue had a pattern supplement where you could find the patterns to some of the illustrated goodies.

It wasn't always easy to pick out the patterns. Sometimes the pattern supplements weren't scanned in with the rest of the issue's pages. Sometimes I'd find a really awesome looking corset, only to find that there wasn't a pattern offered for it. The pattern supplements in the 1930s are a hot mess, reusing numbers for different patterns so I'd get halfway through tracing something out, only to realize that this was absolutely not a corset pattern. 

In the end, I wound up with 116 patterns from 1866 - 1931. It would have been twice as many if I'd included the children's corsets, as there were just as many offered for kids as there were for adults!

So, if you're in need of a Victorian or Edwardian or Vintage corset pattern, you can find them up in the Patterns section above, or just click on that nifty banner above!