Doctor T Designs

I’ve been really happy with my self-drafted bra band pattern that I made using the Bare Essentials method near the end of last year. I’ve been using the self-drafted band as a base and fitting cups from commercial patterns into it, and I’ve really been enjoying the results. So when my sister decided to come out for a visit I knew we needed to make a pattern for her as well, to see if it might resolve some of her fitting issues and to see if we could perfect some of the fit on her patterns.

I’ve been through this process before with my own draft, so although it still took a few hours, it was much easier to go through all of the steps this time. The main differences are that for this pattern I drafted using a much smaller (36 Long) wire instead of my 44 Vertical wire, and I was drafting a much smaller band size. I also didn’t have to worry about omega adjustments, so the cup drafts were a lot more straightforward and don’t look to be ridiculously small as happened with my patterns. Though I will say that the one step I was horribly confused on for my pattern draft (correcting the horizontal seam line length) made a lot more sense this time, so perhaps that would have fixed a few things for me. Anyway, after a few hours of intense measurements, I ended up with a basic pattern draft for my sister:

After the basic draft, I’ve re-traced all the pieces and added seam allowances to sew up a fit sample.

The fit sample is using a lot of leftover materials or things I have realized I don’t really want to use in a finished bra, but they work great for this.

After testing the fit there’s definitely some similar (but slightly different) issues to when I drafted my own cups. When I did my cup draft, they were much too small, likely because I have to use a smaller wire due to my omega shape. This time, the total volume of the cup seemed fairly accurate, but the location of the volume was a bit off – there was far too much volume on the inner cup and not enough at the apex. However, the band fit really well. The center gore was tacking and the back band was level, and nothing was really gaping anywhere. I did reduce the back band by about 1/4″, and I had to do something similar to my pattern, so that was about what I expected.

Adjusting the cups to fit was going to be a lot of work, so at this point we decided to do the same thing I did with my personal bra draft – use the band as a starting point and fit the cups from commercial patterns into it to get the best of both worlds. My sister has a pretty good fit on the Freja bra from Pin-up Girls, and I suspected she’d also have a good fit with the Ruby. For the Freja, we were going to need to do some significant changes to the original pattern’s band, but now we just needed to focus on the cups to fit to this new band. We took in a dart from the upper cup, and I had to adjust the front of the upper cup slightly to fit the wire line, but overall it worked really well. We also decided to try the Ruby cup, which actually fit perfectly (both into the draft and on the body) with no modifications. My sister is really excited to try making a few new bras with these altered patterns soon!

I don’t know how much time we have, but we want to try to fit a few other commercial patterns if we can. Although I put the AFI Atelier patterns on hold for myself, I think it could be worth trying some of these patterns for my sister.

Overall I’m pretty happy with how this draft turned out. I’m a bit disappointed about the fit of the cups and how that has been turning out in all of my experiments up to this point, but I’m super pleased about how well the band fits. And fitting a quasi-spherical surface is very challenging for pattern making, so I’m not too sad over it. And I think that’s pretty much a two for two in terms of band fit for the Bare Essentials drafting book, so it definitely gets a solid recommendation from me if you are interested in drafting your own underwire bra band. My original assessment that I think the Beverly Johnson book is a bit better for drafting cups holds true, but for getting an accurate band, Bare Essentials is definitely a top notch resource.