I'll be trying my hand at a different prompt list every day- this one's from @stephpotterart's drawtober prompts! I thought Harrow was fitting- but mostly I'm just reading HtN and couldn't help myself :)
When I was regathering my long-neglected research for my Helga Sinclair ribbon corset, I rediscovered this gorgeous extant example in the V&A from 1895. Unlike most extant examples I've come across, this one doesn't feature overlapping ribbons. This suggests that it was made for a particularly slim woman who needed very little support and for particular summertime breathability (supported by the garment waist measuring 19", suggesting a laced waist of 22-24".)
To me, long-since trapped in The Locked Tomb, the ribcage-like appearance was inescapable. Wouldn't you know it, I have a Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia costume that I started a year ago that was needing a little something something to pull the design together and to help motivate me.
The pattern was adapted from my Helga ribbon corset, allowing for 24mm wide ribbon to meet at the sides and spread evenly in a ribcage like fashion at the front panel.
This time I used a beautiful shell-coloured silk ribbon. The ribbon is so beautifully soft, that it was a nightmare to work with. I do not recommend it for something that needs quite so much working as it marked with so much as a hard look! I am fairly certain that the V&A example the ribbon is self-mounted, so I again mounted my main ribbon, this time on a white cottong taffeta ribbon. If i slipped with my mounting or the ribbon twisted or buckled, i thought the white would be a suitably stark and skeletal contrast to the main silk ribbon.
As I am perhaps a little more fleshy than the lady who owned the original 1895 example, I cheated and also added a base layer of nude tulle to help smooth out the laced-up silhouette.
The overall construction process was the same as Helga: quilted the ribbon panels across the boned panels before covering and sandwiching them, and inserting the bones from the side to allow for for hem stitching.
To finish, another ivory powder-coated busk and stitched over eyelets for security.