The Wedding Dress - 1st Attempt at Placing Boning

So this was a new thing for me. If you have ever worn a strapless dress, more than likely you are familiar with boning. It is called "boning" because of one of the original materials: whale bone. Boning today is usually made with plastic or metal and can be bought with or without pre-made channels. For purposes of making the muslin for DD wedding dress, I bought some inexpensive boning with channels at my local big box craft center.

Since I had never used boning in any sewing project, I had to do some research on the internet. I found two terrific blogs on how to apply it in a strapless dress. These two blogs are so well done, that I am not going to try to reinvent the wheel and do my own how-to, but I will direct you to Sewaholic and Gertie's New Blog for Better Sewing for detailed instructions on preparing the boning and applying it to the bodice.

I did use Sewaholic's method of heating up the plastic boning in a pot on the stove to reduce the curl in the plastic. This worked great and made it much easier to insert the boning in the channels. I also used her suggestion to use a nail file to smooth out the ends after trimming them  to a curve.

Although I used the purchased boning channels, I really like the method that Gertie used for her dress. I can see where the purchase boning channels could be too bulky -- especially when you are dealing with fine fabrics like silk. I may do that in the final rendition of the dress.

These are the channels in the front of the dress under the bust. I had to guesstimate the length that they need to be. I cut the boning to 9 1/2 inches, sewed the bottom shut and then sewed them carefully on both sides of the channel to the inside of the front princess seam. In the picture on the left you can see that I have completed the application of one channel and have the second one pinned to death.

You may also notice that I have marked the channel
with the length of the boning. I figured that two or 3 months from now, when I fit the dress on DD, I won't remember the length and instead of having to re-measure it, I can just read it off the channel! Well, I have a few more channels to apply so I'll leave it at that.

I just checked on the dress form and it has shipped and is destined to arrive on Tuesday! Yea!

Happy Sewing!