Sewing Bras - Copying My Favorite RTW bra!

It's finally finished! This gorgeous blue and purple bra got put on the back burner as I excitedly sewed up the Pin-up Girls Classic Bra and awaited the arrival of different underwires.

Look at those fabulous colors!

I'm loving how everything turned out! Mirroring the fabric was a labor of love as the original fabric included pixilated gradations from green to blue to purple.

At any rate, a quick run down of how I copied my favorite RTW bra. After stalking Beverly Johnson's (aka The Fairy Bra Mother) blog, she had mentioned "pin copying" the seams [link here] on your favorite bra to get the basic patterns. I had attempted to copy this particular bra before and thought I had a pretty good approximation but this is variation yielded MUCH better results. [Previous attempt here] And with fewer revisions. Actually, I haven't needed to do any alterations yet.

Steps amount to placing paper over foam board/cardboard. Place bra on top of paper - making sure the paper is large enough to pin copy the pieces on to. I started with the smallest piece - inner bottom cup. Use a few pins to "stretch" out the corners and curves. Then use a pin to "trace" around the seam lines like you're a cheap tattoo artist. Remove and repeat on an different piece. For longer pieces you may need to pin out half of the piece, "trace" with pin, remove most of pins leaving the ones near the center of that piece. Then pin the other half of the piece and finish "tracing" the piece with the pin. Trace the dots and true the lines. Your patterns pieces are ready!

Here are my results!

In this particular case, while i did trace the bridge and back band, I used my go-to pieces. A heavily altered cradle and back band from the Maya bra.