Noelle Bralette aka The Start of My Lingerie Adventures!

*Fabric gifted by Minerva.com in exchange for a post on their website. All opinions are my own.*

It's been a while since I've touched my sewing machine. My sewjo went on an extended vacation since late summer, and I barely gathered enough energy for this. Life has really felt very overwhelming lately, I think a lot of us feel the same way after 1.5 years into our Covid quarantine situation. (Don't let the pictures below fool you)

That aside, my first Minerva Make is here! I was so inspired by the classes and workshops at International Bra Sewing Bee (formerly Great Bra Sewing Bee) that I picked out a stretch lace without giving too much thought! I was originally thinking it would make a wonderful lingerie piece that I could prance around the house feeling beautiful. The idea was to use the Noelle Bralette as a starting point and make a lingerie slip/dress. I even sketched up a few ideas. The one I really gravitated towards was a Noelle Bralette sewn with a skirt into a babydoll-ish style lingerie dress. While the bralette will be lined, the skirt portion won't be. The bonus would be to add in a matching Noelle panty to make it a perfect set!

But the project scope quickly shrunk due to lack of energy and life I mentioned earlier. I started with a toile for the bralette, but forgo everything after.

The Pattern, Sizing and Toile

Speaking of toile, apparently I chose the wrong size! Actually, let me back up. Madalynne’s patterns are geared towards smaller busts bodies, and in limited size range. Knowing her intended audience is the itty bitty titty committee, I was very excited and had high hopes the pattern will work well for me. I started off with a S, according to the pattern sizing directions of “if you normally wear a size 30/32 band”, but the full bust table puts me in between XS and S, so I followed the directions and size up.

The toile fabric was a cotton jersey with a similar amount of stretch as the lace. And it turned out I had to size down back to XS and take in the bottom band a bit more to fit me! I won’t show toile pictures due to modesty reasons, but the toile definitely pointed out a lot of fit issues that I had to fix. I highly recommend making one before you use any precious lace.

About the Fabric

When my Minerva package arrived, I was so thrilled and so obsessed with the color! It was my first time playing around with stretch lace. I was really puzzled by the selvage edge which ends up rippling the fabric a bit. After giving it some thoughts, I decided to cut off the selvage bit on a test area to see if any threads would end up undone/fray. But everything looked okay, so I proceeded to cutting out the pattern pieces. Because this lace is very see through, I decided I need to line the bralette with a power net I picked up from Surge Fabrics. A major tip before cutting out your final fabric is to double check which direction the DOGS, or degrees of greatest stretch, is. You wouldn't want to not have enough stretch to pull it on! I would also think about where you want the lace placement to be, I really wanted the lace scallop edges right on my waist, so I very gingerly cut out the pieces, while making sure the lace were overlapping the right way on the side seams.

See the ripple effect from the edge?

Lined with powermesh

No lining is super see through

Because this is lace, it was also pretty difficult to mark where my darts were. This is when I used some hand-basting/tailoring techniques from my coat-making adventure. It was so much easier to tack in the dart and then sew it on the machine. PHEW~

Tips for First Time Sewing Lingerie Fabrics and Elastics

Since this is my first time sewing lingerie, I had a lot of trouble finding the correct settings on my vintage sewing machine (Singer 401) and kept getting a lot of skipped stitches. If you're familiar with sewing knits, you already know that we're trying to achieve a zigzag stitch here for stretch purposes. But how do we get there? There are several variables I want to change here:

• needle type
• even feeding
• pressor foot pressure
• stitch length & width
• top thread tension

I know it's a long list, but you can dial some of these in pretty easily. First, I recommend putting on a walking foot to ensure the sewing material is fed in evenly. Then I would change the needles, I tried ballpoint and universal. I remember hearing somewhere at the Bra Sewing Bee that microtex needle could be helpful, so I actually tried that first. But after some failed stitches, I decided to move onto ballpoint and universal ones. My final winner that made the best stitches was a ballpoint needle. However, there is a stretch needle out there that I've heard will help prevent skipped stitches altogether when sewing these tricky elastic-ky fabrics! But I don't have any in my stash and my energy spike wasn't going to wait for the needle to arrive.

Next is the stitch length and width, I find it easier to sew with smaller stitch length and width - that's just my gut feeling. But I would say, given how tightly knitted the powermesh material is, smaller is better. I've come across many recommendations on sewing lingerie in specific 2.5mmx1.5mm instructions, but my vintage machine doesn't have that, so I had to figure out what looks "right". And "right" happens to be ~12-15 stitches per inch on my machine. :) I would also add that, for my finishing stitch on the picot elastics, I used a 4-step zig zag stitch instead of a regular zigzag. My old machine doesn't have a 3-step but you can use that for more modern machines. The point is that with a 4-step zigzag like that, you get the benefits of lots of stretch AND skipped stitches looked a lot less obvious.

I tried increasing the pressor foot pressure at first, thinking that it would help to pull the fluffy picot elastic material better. But in the end, I don't think that was a major variable to be concerned about. In fact, I would fiddle with the thread tension first before changing that foot pressure. So I actually dialed down the tension until the stitches look even-ish. 

Now that I have gone through almost everything I had to change to make the stitches look remotely acceptable, I was still getting skipped stitches. Surprisingly, going too slow and too fast made the stitches skip even more. At some point, I just eyeballed it, and let my foot and sight to figure out what seems to work. Okay, I really just went for it and not overthink it too much. 

Thoughts on the Pattern and Future Iterations

Back to the pattern. Because this is a free pattern, the sewing instructions were okay and not very hand-holdy. There are no diagrams, only pure text as instructions. I would say it is suitable for someone who at least have some sewing experiences and understand how to put a garment together. But I love the final product - it looks so amazing. I had to improvise on the strap attachment (Translation: I completely ignored the sewing instructions and just went for it.) 

If I had to change anything on my next version, I would make the strap adjustable, because it is so difficult to ensure I was sewing the strap on at the correct length! Adjustable strap also means I can pull it on easier. Right now, it requires a bit of a contourist maneuver to take it off, lol! The other thing I would add is that, if you've got perky nips like me and feel self conscious, you may want to consider adding some foam cups in between the layers for the crop top version. 

One more tip I have is that, if you have the budget, it probably is best to make a toile using the final fabric you have. While getting a toile fabric with properties as close as possible to the final fabric is good, I think using a sample of the final fabric may help get a real grasp of the fabric on your body, and how it sews with all the other layers. Because bras and bralettes require much smaller amount of fabric than a garment, I don't think it's a lot of "waste" if you really need that to assess and perfect your fit. 

Many thanks to Minerva for providing the fabric and allowing me to explore different fabrics. I love the final product and feel like super model who belongs on a lingerie magazine or billboard!