A Rub Off Bra

I've made myself a number of bras now, about 5 or so in total - plus swimwear made from my Bravo Bella bra pattern, but with every bra I've made I find I have one big problem. The underwire keeps poking out.

I originally thought it was just the makeshift underwire casing that I was making myself, but then I bought some proper casing and it still kept happening.  So I had a good hard look at my bras and compared them to the couple of ready to wear ones that I still have.  What I realised is that my new bras are still not sitting perfectly against my breast bone and I think that that warping is making the underwire poke through.

So what I did is take my Bravo Bella Bravo Bra #2 bridge pattern, and the one bra that I have that sits perfectly against my breast bone and compared the two - yep there is a lot of difference between the shape of the bridges.  The Bravo Bra is much more angled.

So whats a girl to do - make myself a new pattern based on the bra that fits like I want.  Now that I understand how these things go together it was really quite easy.  I traced each of the pieces of the bra onto a piece of paper and added seam allowances and then just used the same instructions for the Bravo Bra to put together my new bra.

The only difference was that my RTW bra didn't have elastic along the top of the cup, but that was easy enough to finish off.

I still had some underwire casing from my last bra notions order, the underwires I stole out of my orange paisley bra - its just about had it any way. I used a piece of boning at the side seams and covered it with some underwire casing taken off a $3 store bought bra and the pink elastic is the straps off that same $3 bra.

The band is your basic 5/8" no roll elastic as I've found that that gives the best support.  The straps and were taken off an old maternity bra that's got chucked once I was finished breast feeding.  I kept the straps because they're good 3/4" wide straps.  The hook and eye at the back is from an old bra in the discard pile (I would have used the one of, but as this was a trial I wasn't going to worry about that.

The fabric for the bra was all from stash.  Peacock feather black poly lycra for the outside and purple nylon tricot inside.  A small bit of left over power mesh is inside the band back.

This bra doesn't have the best finish.  I just wanted to try it out before I spent too much time and effort.

So the verdict:  I've been wearing the bra for a couple of months now.  The first time I wore it the underwires poked out, but I  reinforced the ends of the underwire casing and I haven't had any problems since. The cups are maybe a smidge too big.  I think next time I'd like to try the cup shape from the Bravo Bra inside this bridge and see how that works.