Well! 2019 was a bit of a whirlwind… in fact the last 5 years seems to have merged into some sort of all consuming time warp tornado that took me to some incredible places, and afterwards seems like it only took a jiffy! Time and again in the last few weeks I’ve been reminded of things which happened ‘5 years ago’ which seem like only yesterday! So I thought I’d better track my work in 2019 so that you don’t imagine i’m the Wicked Witch of the West having been squashed under a house after what seems like an age of non-activity! In truth i’ve just been in the middle of a maelstrom of work! Or eaten by a giant fur boa constrictor - more on that later!

As usual, the year started off with a huge raft of good intentions, proposed projects, goals and fantasies (I always over plan!). I can report that precisely none of them got done! Yep. Not a single one. It’s not as bad as it sounds - the reason they all became somewhat redundant is because unexpected amazing things did happen.

January to June every year is generally taken up with bridal work and I had a few brides along with my usual repeat clients, from Jan-Feb, tightlacers and full time corseters who require new corsets to be made regularly. I was pleased to note that one such set of ‘old’ corsets which a client brought for me to inspect after he had washed them every month for a couple of years, was in near perfect condition! You can wash corsets, but I generally don’t recommend it unless you are committed to the fact that one day they will go rusty and you will need to have a cycle of renewals planned.

In March I had intended to formulate some different ‘ready to wear’ corset patterns and open a ‘cincher shop’ here on site for ready to ship individually designed cinchers made from my huge fabric and lace stash, but somehow those ideas were consumed elsewhere and are now in my book of goals for 2020 along with an even bigger fabric and lace stash! I had a lovely intern, Danielle - now a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, for most of March and together we worked on other things, including a set of video fitting instructions for a future online corset making course. It was during Danielle’s internship that I realised I need a full time stitcher - another thing for the list!

My favourite bridal commission of the year, which was completed in June was from Carrie who is actually one of the artists in my little Cuckoo Lane Community here in Oxfordshire. She gave me a few guidelines on what she wanted, showed me her dress - then her other dress, and we ‘live’ designed around it - I thought it was the perfect project to revisit a design i’d worked with a few years back - ‘pebble quilting’ on pink silk, to echo the pink polkadots on Carrie’s gorgeous dress and also her bubbly personality. Infact the finished item is distinctly Schiaparelli’esque don’t you think? See her work at @carriestanleyartist over at Instagram.

In April the real work of the year - and infact the pinnacle of my entire corsetry career - started! You’ll remember a while back I made some corsets for Immodesty Blaize, queen of burlesque (and still the best performer out there quite frankly), well for a while now we’ve been working on what we had been calling ‘the cat costume’ for maybe 2 or 3 years - every so often she would send me a new sketch with a new catty idea and so we trundled on because what we actually needed was a show and a budget! That came at the beginning of the year in the form of Marc Almond’s planned big band show, part of the ‘Apollo Nights Summer Series’, which took place in London in July with Immodesty Blaize as the special guest star.

After all the years of planning the imaginary cat costume, Immodesty and I now had only 4 months to get two costumes together. The costumes comprised 2 corsets, a dress which turned into a cape, knickers, and a massive fur boa - as usual, the work was quite organic, changing a few times in the making as we did fittings and had other ideas and realisations through the process. The results were utterly spectacular but it literally took every nano-second of time from 1 April until 30 June - mainly because things I thought would ‘take 2 hours’ took literally 2 weeks! Thank you silk velvet nightmare fabric from hell! (Another blog post to document the process is pending). When the outfit was finished it was all sent to Immodesty to stone it all up - I can’t remember how many stones she said but it was ALOT! Now you may think it all sounds quite easy to make 2 corsets and a dress, and a cape and some knickers, but we did most of the fittings remotely due to travel constraints - so between that, and the fact that we had limited materials and limited time, it was a bit of a nail biter to say the least!

On 20 July, I travelled to London to dress Immodestly for the show, and what a wonderful evening it was! Lots of hard work, lots of scurrying around behind the stage, remembering which shoes go with which outfit, and generally trying to remember what to do, and when to do it, so that everything went as smoothly as possible for her.

All through the year, other than making corsets and costumes, I obviously run my ‘day job’ - the shop, Sew Curvy Retail which gets busier with every passing month, supplying film companies, theatres and top coutre houses as well as all the lovely corsetieres, seamstresses and costumiers all over the world. I also did a bit of teaching, and this year, was also planning and attending the final Oxford Conference of Corsetry which took place at the end of August in our usual gorgeous venue, Jesus College, Oxford.

I had decided a while ago that it would be the last conference of it’s type. 5 conferences seemed a good number to end with, Jesus College is changing, the conference had done its job elevating the general world standard of corsetry to incredible levels, and I wanted to really mind my own businesses having helped everyone else’s businesses for the last 10 years. Here are some of my favourite Instagram posts from the event - you can see much more by looking up the hashtag #OCOC19 on instagram or visiting the official account @conferenceofcorsetry. Click on the images to make them bigger.

Because it was the last conference, there were three things to do.

1) research and prepare a talk to deliver at the Conference
2) make a final showpiece
3) make another corset to showcase my new range of cinchers (refer to previous para on 2019 goals!).

I spent a lot of July and much of August, studying the corsetry and legacy of Iris Norris who was a well known independent corsetiere during the 80’s and who also specialised in male corsetry. A client had asked me to replicate his favourite Norris corset and rather than simply take a pattern from his old corsets which he very kindly loaned me for research, I was determined to find out how it worked and what her formula was. That way I could make the new corset actually feel like the corsets that she made for him, which fitted him so well. It’s easy enough to take a pattern from a corset, but it’s quite something else to get the distribution and proportions right in order to get the same shape, feel and level of comfort in combination. The project was very intense but yielded an incredible amount of information, some of which I was able to convey to the assembled crowd of corset makers and enthusiasts who came from all over the world to attend the Conference. Meanwhile my lovely client was so delighted with the ‘new Norris’ that he almost burst with joy when we tried the final mock-up’ on! I shall post separately about this research, along with all the other things I’ve got to post about!

It took a long time to wrangle the final OCOC Showpiece out of my poor tired brain, but wrangle we did and finally I had a Mugler inspired leather and satin ‘beetle corset’ for legendary corset model Bex Paul to wear at the conference. Again, no fitting due to time constraints on both sides, but luckily it fitted almost perfectly on the day. Yet another separate blog post as there are lots of details to tell you about, but in the meantime here it is.

After the conference, there was a short holiday in Spain, where it rained, and then it was back to work with a vengeance for the remaining part of the year. Still no time to work on my own designs but plenty of stuff to work on and learn about along with a visit from the BBC who came to film a little programme about my work for the local news

Autumn brought a new crop of bridal consultations, more repeat clients, a corset body for a drag queen complete with fake boobs to toile, a winter outfit, and one client who flew all the way from Australia in December to have an asymmetric corset fitted over an intense 9 day period - I was exceptionally pleased at the result of that as we managed to achieve a great shape and the balance that he was looking for. All of that took me up to Christmas which was followed by another short break, this time in Wales where it also rained, and now here we are in 2020 with another planner full of goals for the coming year!

I will try harder this year to document all the things this year, both here, and on social media! To follow me on Instagram, go to @jbcorsets and @sewcurvycouture on Facebook (they wont let me change the name!).

In the meantime, Happy New Year to all of you! I hope to meet some of you in the coming year - do get in touch for commissions - and stay tuned for hopefully some new stuff in the next few months!

2019 Review