The corset is complete!

The corset is finished! I spent the evening of the 11th making the grommet holes on the other half of the corset and Friday evening ignoring it. Saturday didn't have all that much sewing time in it, but I did get the loop side of the busk inserted into the right front facing. Sunday was pretty much non-stop sewing from about 10am until just gone 5pm; and I finished it! The busk went in easily and flat felling seams with three seam allowances in is no harder than the other ones (possibly because they're also pretty straight). I'm not convinced that all the bones are an appropriate length for the channels, though. The wide bone in the back is so long I had to hand-stitch the binding around it because there wasn't enough seam allowance to stitch over it. The remaining back bones are an appropriate length. The side and front bones, though, appear to be significantly shorter than I would expect, being a centimetre or two shorter than the channels they sit in. This may be intentional; at least they're less likely to stab me under the arms, and the front won't project out sharply over the bust. On the other hand, it may be due to me being inaccurate, but the rest of it has been so spot-on that I would find it surprising.

I haven't actually tried it on yet, I don't have any laces for it! I think I'm going to have to unlace a skate or my docs tonight to give it a trial run possibly with photographs. My tentative attempts at trying it on (i.e. James pulling the back of it together) suggest that it may be on the large side. You shouldn't be able to lace a corset of this type closed. On the other hand, lacing it closed would, I think, give me a very respectable squeeze, and since this corset doesn't have a waist tape it's not really designed for giving me a major squeeze, so I'm not too worried overall.

Total time spent on making corset: about 20 hours, I think. Could probably halve that with practice/advance knowledge of what I was actually doing. Could probably knock off another couple of hours if I made some short-cuts, but this has turned out very neat and professional-looking, so I don't know that I'd want to. Anyway, success. Photographs to follow.