bustle | thebarethreads

I found ‘Stichless TV’ a while back on Youtube. It’s a woman in London who upcycles clothes and makes odd reproductions of designer clothes she likes.

She made a bustle t-shirt and I decided to try my own. I cut a semi-circle out of the back of an old t-shirt.

Then cut triangles and similar shapes from pieces of jersey and denim. I arranged these pieces in a rough triangular shape, making sure the bottom edge was a neat straight line. I measured the curve I had cut into my t-shirt at 49cm so I made sure the bottom line of my fabric pieces was also 49cm. I matched the centre point of the frabric pieces and the centre point of the t-shirt curve and sewed them wrong sides together.

I think the denim was too heavy, and the fabric pieces I used were generally too small. But anyway it ended up looking weird. I suppose a bustle t-shirt was always going to look odd but it’s a different kind of odd than I was going for.

Original Bustle Dress

Modern Bustle Interpretation

I previously posted about making a steampunk skirt for an event boyfriend and I are planning to go to. Well this is the bustle I made to go with it. For the uninitiated bustles were added to the back of skirts and dresses in the C19th to add fullness.

I was using large remnants of a patterned denim fabric so the pieces I had to start with were an odd shape. I roughly estimated how wide I wanted the bustle (about half my waist measurement) and then shaped the piece of fabric I was using as the base accordingly. I added two pleats at the top so it would curve around my body and rounded off the bottom. Then I hemmed the whole thing.

How I Made A Bustle

I got my other piece of fabric and spent about four hours trying to figure out how to fold it to create the bustle! I simply folded the fabric and used about 7 million pins to hold it in place before sewing. The layers start wider and get narrower which wasn’t my original plan but the fabric piece was an uneven shape so that was my only option. I hemmed the edges before I folded it, then sewed the hem again as well as straight down the middle to keep it all together. Then I sewed it onto the base piece. It’s not as full as I would like so I might add some more padding to it further down the line. But here it is: