Doctor T Designs

Although the Bra Sewing Bee is over, I have extended my membership in The Hive so I can continue to participate in the ongoing meetings, challenges, and events that they are promoting throughout the rest of the year. One thing they have started doing is a monthly sewing challenge. Last month it prompted me to sew the Loftus bra pattern, and this month I was inspired to try sewing a bra with an unexpected material – quilting cotton.

Although they announce the following month’s challenge well in advance and I should be able to say that I had spent a bit of time planning out this project, because of my recent travel schedule I basically went through my stash and threw all of this together within the past few days. The full challenge was to make a bra with cotton, patchwork, or quilting. As much as I would love to try some patchwork and quilting techniques that I have seen used on other bra designs, due to my time crunch I went straight for the quilting cotton option. I had a few options for fabric, but after looking through my stash and realizing that my rainbow fold over elastic went really well with this fun cotton print I couldn’t resist doing such a bright and happy design. Even better I had some bright blue bottom band elastic and channeling, and blue power net I picked up on one of my recent trips, so the whole project really came together quite well. The only place my stash let me down a bit was options for strapping elastic (I wish I had had bright blue or fuchsia but I settled for red). Despite that, I think it generally goes with the bright and happy rainbow color scheme and overall I’m really happy with how it looks!

I used what has now become my TNT Josey pattern, though I made even a few more tweaks since the last version which I just finished earlier this week. I raised the bottom band by 1/8″ along the bottom edge and thinned it out under the lowest part of the wire. I also opted to use the gothic arch version of the band instead of the version with the straighter line across the center bridge. I’m happy to report that this is the most comfortable fit on the band for this pattern thus far, and I’m really pleased with it at this point and don’t think I need to make any additional changes. Probably my self-drafted band will still be my preferred band moving forward, but I would consider using the Josey band in the future too. I think that I really need the super thin band under the wire line (or perhaps I need to start playing around with partial band bras soon) and I should probably preferentially make gothic arch fronts because I find them more comfortable.

I will say that working with the cotton was mostly easy, though it did want to fray and make a mess of fibers a lot more than most of the traditional bra making materials I’ve been using up to this point. I typically line my bras with sheer cup lining, but I especially made a point to do so with this bra because I was worried the fabric would fray beyond use after some wash and wear if I didn’t. I also made sure to cut the cotton out on the bias along the DOGS (degree of greatest stretch) line for the cup pieces so they would stretch and round out and not pull or cause weird flat spots. I also modified the pattern a bit to utilize fold over elastic along the upper edge instead of my traditional narrow picot elastic.

I’ve been wearing this bra all day and I have some thoughts. Firstly, for anyone who has concerns about how hot bras get in the summer, I would definitely recommend trying a cotton bra. I was outside much of today and while it wasn’t as hot and humid as it had been recently, it was still pretty hot, but I found the cotton bra didn’t overheat as much as a fully synthetic one, even with a nylon sheer cup lining. Secondly, if you are planning to make cotton bras, it might be worth playing with the pattern to modify the fit slightly. I found that the cotton didn’t sit quite as snuggly as my duoplex versions of the same pattern, though I am curious to see how the fit might change after it goes through the wash (note: my cotton was pre-washed so I don’t expect shrinkage, but I have found that most of my bras fit better after going through at least one laundry cycle). Thirdly, I probably should have taken off even more allowance along the top edge of my pattern to prep it for the fold over elastic. I took off the elastic allowance, but I had previously added a bit to the height at the wire line to better account for the turn of cloth bulk where I would fold the picot elastic over the channeling and still need enough buffer for wire play and to not worry about the needle hitting the wire when sewing it all in place. Since I was using narrower fold over, the extra wire play allowance was a bit too much, and I think this has made the top of the band not quite as snug as I would generally prefer. Finally, I would say that while the cotton fabrication opens up a world of design options, I think I still prefer using duoplex or microduoplex as a primary material. I found that clothing sticks to the cotton a bit, rather than sliding over it, so depending on your shirt material you might find that the clothing doesn’t move as easily over the cotton bra as you might like. Occasionally I found that this also led to a tiny bit of bunching where the cotton would sort of stick to itself and I would need to make a quick adjustment to the side of the bra, but it wasn’t a huge problem or annoyance (and probably wouldn’t have been an issue if I’d not had as much wire play along the top edge of the bra). Also, unrelated to the cotton fabric selection, I decided to make foam straps for this version and I love them. It’s not the first time I’ve done this treatment, but I have to admit that all of the bras I reach for the most have foam straps because they are wonderfully comfortable, so I should really prioritize using this feature more.

Overall I am really happy I participated in this challenge! I feel like I learned to work with a new material and I have a lot of fun fabric options available to me now that I might not have considered previously. I also think that despite the small tweaks I could make, this bra is both comfortable and fun, and I expect I will be reaching for it a lot over the next few weeks of summer.