In the last week, we planned the lace overlay for our bralette,
and prepared the pattern pieces.
Now it's time to sew it!
If you ever tried to sew a bralette with fold-over elastic edges
you may experience that this bralette has a significantly less support
than a bralette finished with picot elastic!
I have the very same experience.
Why it´s caused?
The fold-over elastic has a much larger stretch percentage
and a much lower density
than the picot elastic.
So it's not very good at stabilizing the edges of your bralette and they tend to stretch out.
Okay, cool.
But...
How to solve that?
It's actually very easy,
we can reinforce it!
That's why I always use one more elastic in addition to the fold-over elastic:
A Clear elastic!
What is a clear elastic?
• Clear elastic is usually used to reinforce the scallop edge of the lace.
• It can be used for swimwear too.
• Its quite rigid elastic with a similar stretch percentage as picot elastic.
How does it work?
It stabilizes the edge and it will provide you desired support,
so the edge doesn't stretch out,
as if you would use fold-over elastic alone.
How to do that?
Firstly, sew the clear elastic to the edge of your bralette.
I usually use a 6 mm clear elastic with a 10 mm fold-over elastic (20 mm before folding).
In the image below you can see applied clear elastic along all bralette edges.
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Sew the FoE as normal on the top of the clear elastic.
In the image below you can see the fold-over elastic applied over the clear elastic.
Try to keep the clear elastic placed under the fold-over elastic entirely. That's why we used narrower clear elastic than the fold-over elastic.
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It's up to you if you prefer applying fold-over elastic in one or two passes.
That's it!
Your bralette is finished with the fold-over elastic while it is stable and supportive!
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