Two More Bras- Pink and Orange Paisley and Teal Lace

For the last couple of months, I've been steadily working on perfecting a bra pattern.  I started with the Bravo Bella  Bravo Bra #2 pattern -  My first attempts were blogged here.  Whilst I could see that the pattern had some merit I certainly wasn't totally happy with it so I went back and had a second attempt playing around with the cup sizing and making sure I followed the pattern a bit more closely this time.

Bra #3

Bra #4

For Bra #3 I used the 36G Cup pieces and the 36 for the bridge, but kept the 38 for the back band.    I used my nylon tricot for the inner cut and power mesh for the inner band and used a pink/orange/black paisly knit fabric for the outside.

This turned out much better, but it still had a few fitting issues.  Mainly there was just a bit too much fullness in the top of the cup.  

I again used 5/8" elastic for the bottom band 3/8" for the top of the band and cups.  This time I also extended the 5/8" elastic on the back end of the straps down and into the band closure.

I used some crepe satin material to make the underwire casings and again the underwires and back closures were taken from a $3 bra I bought at Walmart for that purpose. I had a few issues with the underwires poking through the casing but went back and covered the ends of the underwire casings with gross grain ribbon where necessary and they seem to be holding up OK now.

At this point I was pretty happy with the pattern so decided to break into the lace fabric that I bought a couple of months ago for this purpose.  Its a teal green with a 2 way stretch.

But first I had to go back and make a few modifications to my pattern based on the previous bra.
First I decided that the seam down the bottom center of the cup was redundant - it doesn't provide any further shaping so I put the two pattern pieces (pattern piece 1 and 2) together and traced them.  In order to remove the fullness at the top of the breast I then cut both the upper and lower cup pieces at the center point and overlapped the pieces, whilst also trimming some length off the bottom of the upper cup piece.

I was originally just going to use the lace as the outer piece and the tricot/powernet as the inner pieces, but realised when I tried to sew it together that that allowed all the ugly edges to show through, so I went back and cut another set of the cup pieces out of the tricot and lined the lace in tricot.

To make the underwire channeling this time I use the nylon tricot, but I folded it over twice so there was 4 layers of the material in the channeling - so far I have not had any issues with the underwire poking through.

Otherwise everything else was the same as the previous bra.

I did make a pair of underpants to match the pink/orange/black bra, and two pairs to match the teal lace bra, however the teal ones didn't turn out great since I forgot to account for the fact that the lace only has two way stretch....still they look pretty at least.

Overall, both these bras are really comfortable and give good support.  I think I'm finally happy with this pattern and will finally invest in some real bra making notions so my next bra can be perfect - hopefully!