Making a vintage bra cup

Do you ever have a task in mind, which you have every intention of doing, until you sit down with a cup of tea midmorning, and something on the table, while you are drinking, catches your eye, and you think .. "ooooh ... I could try that" ...  "Right after i've done that other thing i've got to do" ...  And then after your cuppa, you can't quite focus on the original task because you're too busy thinking about the new thing, and so you just have to go with the flow or get nothing done at all .....

And so it was yesterday when I saw this picture of a vintage bra in one of my corsetry books and thought "that looks interesting" ....

Surely it's just a case of dartage, I thought to myself, ignoring the very complicated looking diagrams and even more non-sensical instructions ... no no no .. It must just be a case of closing those two regular darts, tracing the pattern off, and sewing together the resulting parts ...

Er .... no it seems not.  Mr M  came home from work just as I was holding the 'cup' to my bosom and sniggered "are you making dustcaps?" ... :/  It's good to make mistakes though, as the greatest lessons are learned here and navigating through mistakes, is the best way to gain a deeper understanding ...

So it was back to the drawing board, and this time a closer inspection of the dreadfully written instructions which took some improvisation to implement, not least because they seem to be written backwards!!

I got there in the end.  Basically, you have to move the shoulder dart down to the bottom, which doubles the width of the 'waist' dart  (making a 'french dart' infact) ... then you have to add to these darts again so that the resulting shape, cups the boob - the book does not explain how or why, or how much, so I improvised here and made the top darts at 45 degree angles - 0.5 cm each side and added .5cm to each side of the bottom dart.

After tracing off the parts of the pattern, and closing the darts, I ended up with this!  Now all of these pieces are ready to trace off again (there's a lorralorra tracing involved!!)  so that they form smooth pattern shapes ready to be cut from fabric.  The shape of the 'bra' needs tweaking as you can see, and so will the the fit - the book allows for these 'discrepancies' thank goodness - it's always better that they say so don't you think? Else one ends up thinking that there's are more problems than there might be!

The book also says of this style of bra - which is one of three styles given - that if you slant the bottom of the cup and move the straps so that they sit wider, you end up with a plunge bra which pushes up and together, giving a fantastic cleavage.

I think i'm becoming a dart geek!  I find dart manipulation SO intriguing - there are just so many possibilities - it's mind boggling!  My pattern teacher explained it like the segments of an orange.  You take one segment out - that is the dart, but the empty space doesn't have to remain where you put it first.  If you take another segment, and put it in the gap, then you have a gap elsewhere - do you see what I mean?