Weekend lingerie is what I call a comfortable, no-underwire matching knickers and bra set. I bought myself a Jockey set earlier this year and have loved wearing it so much that I decided to make a knockoff of my own.
When I was last at Dressew, I found some patently ridiculous elastic with little army men, helicopters, tanks and explosions. This elastic was the inspiration for choosing khaki-green cotton Lycra with blue lightning bolts on it as my first test for this new make. I’ve also got some really brightly coloured cat print to make a second round.
I traced the pattern for the top off my Jockey bra, and then attempted to use McCalls 5400 view H (out of print) for the bottoms. I’ve just used this pattern for my silly bathing suit project and I know it turns out okay. However, I discovered that my fabric has a lot of stretch so the bottoms would have been really big if I’d stuck to the pattern, so I basically hacked away at the pieces once I’d cut them out so they worked out to be roughly the same size as the Jockey undies.
I put the underwear together with just my serger for the seams and regular sewing machine for the elastic, using zigzag stitch, then folding over. They’re a bit on the snug side but I’m satisfied and they do NOT look like granny panties. Yay!
The bra involved fold-over elastic, and I had to go to the store to get the right colour. My coverstitch made it really easy to put the fold-over elastic on, although changing the thread colour was a pain in the ass again. The feed dogs are viciously gnarly as well, so sometimes things get stuck if you’re starting at a raw edge. There was a bit of cursing.
Finally, I sewed the army-men elastic in a circle and pinned it to the bottom of the bra, then stitched it on with the cover stitch machine. Easy peasy lemon squeezie!
I’m not really ready to show off my knickers on this blog, sorry. You’ll have to believe me that they look relatively competently made. And most importantly, the whole outfit is comfortable.
Win!
