A lime and powder blue bra set

Ugh, what a crappy holiday. I caught a cold on the 23rd, which then took a merry journey through all my insides throughout the festive season. I was ill with a cough, snotty sinuses, headache, chest infection, etc for the entire two week holidays. By Day 12 I dragged myself to the GP who gave me antibiotics lest it turn into pneumonia, and it was only on the final weekend that I started to feel a little bit better. But I feel like I deserve a holiday do-over in a few weeks – I got cheated out of so much time – there were so many things I wanted to go done…

I’m not sure why, but when I’m ill, I turn to sewing lingerie. Maybe the lace and pretty things bring me comfort, or maybe it’s that the small pieces don’t require standing up to go to the iron. Who knows! In any case, when I was able to sit up without feeling dizzy, I pulled out the Orange Lingerie Marlborough bra pattern again, this time to match a pair of Lacey Thongs I made last winter that have been waiting for a mate this long.


The colours are weird here – the photos below are more indicative of the true colours

I tried to sew a bra from this fabric and lace a while back, but it was an utter FAIL – not even good enough to document, just one for immediately cutting off the hardware and binning. So it took me a while to want to cut into the lace again – not until I had the success of my first Marlborough bra in fact!

I used some interesting fringed elastic from MacCulloch & Wallis as a feature on the Lacey Thongs, splitting it in half and using it as piping in addition to the waistband treatment. I also (clearly) used the stretch lace throughout instead of just on the wings, too.

A pale pink and green lingerie set

I’m not sure sure what happened, but I caught the lingerie-sewing urge hard a few weeks ago and finally cut into some gorgeous pale green lace I’ve been hording for years. It’s been so long that I’m not even entirely sure which online-lingerie-fabric-shop-which-has-since-closed-down I bought it from – eLingeria? Danglez? In any case, it was worth holding on to, and worth buying a pale pink bra findings kit off etsy a year or two ago, and then finally purchasing some pale pink “silk touch” lycra from Tia Knight about 6 months ago to finish off my supplies!

Frankly, I’ve been meaning to sew more Orange Lingerie Marlborough bras ever since I’ve made my other two. The original pale yellow one I wear several times a week, every week, and I love it. The wings on the pale blue one have stretched out a bit, and I really need to unpick the back hooks and shift them smaller to make the band more stable so I’ll wear that one more, too. But that I have two highly wearable bras that I love has meant that I doubt I’ll ever sew another underwired bra pattern again (unless Norma releases another, I suppose!).

The construction on this bra is the same as the other two – my only changes were stylistic, namely to not overlay the lace onto the frame, and to not line that piece, either. I fused lightweight interfacing onto the lower cup, centre front, and frame pieces, then basted the lace overlay on top, and used another pale pink piece as lining as I constructed. I also stabilised the scallop edge of the upper cup with clear elastic, because I didn’t have any beige narrow elastic, which I vastly prefer to the horrible clear stuff!

After I finished the bra, I kept the momentum going and made two pairs of panties to match – one using my (still free!) Lacey Thong pattern, which I could make in my sleep these days, but that I love and just plain works for me.