Our Lace Bra Kits take the guesswork out of bra building by putting together everything you'll need to make a beautiful bra using your own pattern. If you need a pattern, we have a great selection on our Patterns Page, both paper and downloadable.
For so many people, the Marlborough is their very favorite bra pattern! It has a classic shape, and it seems to work for a lot of people. Join Janna to sew this one up, and to learn to split the lower cup for larger volume breasts. Finally, this gives you a chance to use your new fitting band! It's a great recipe for success!
This bra kit features your choice of Stretch Silk Satin, Microduoplex, Super Simplex, or Sheer Cup Lining as the base fabric. Every opaque base fabric also comes with Sheer Cup Lining. One kit contains everything that you need to make a bra and has enough fabric for 2 with many sizes if you pick up an extra bra finishing kit. To get the second bra with larger sizes, upgrade to the half yard of cup fabric and add a bra finishing kit.
While you can use just about any bra kit for your Marlborough, we've chosen these beautiful laces, each with a silk option, for this year's Bee. Blooms Unfolding is classic with a bit of drama in tones of gray, green and a hint of coral. This is a stretch lace. Electric Slide is bold and eye-catching with its electric blue silk with black accents, all tied together with a beautiful blue and black stretch lace. This variation relies on the silk for the color, so other base fabrics will be all in black with the same stretch lace. Sweet William is a confection of peach and ivory with a tulle lace that has a ribbon embroidered into the motif. It is so feminine!
There are 3 different ways to add your matching undies. First, you can add a Friday French Cut kit so that you can sew along with the Sew Along. This pattern is best with tulle laces (Sweet William), but can also work with stretch laces. The Wednesday Cheekies pattern takes great advantage of the stretch lace options (Blooms Unfolding and Electric Slide). The entire undie is made from the lace, and it's fast and easy to sew up. Finally, you can add one of our traditional undie kits to make up into your favorite pattern. Your fabrics will match the fabrics on the bra and the elastics will match the elastics. Electric Slide will be all black.
A Marlborough Lace Bra Kit contains:
We've include the option to add-on a Friday French Cut Undies or another matching undie kit. Each of these includes:
Sewing Notes:
The strength of our microduoplex fabric, which makes it so wonderful for bras, also makes it hard to puncture with needles and pins. This is true with most duoplex fabrics. Use either fine silk pins or Wonder Clips to pin (I find Wonder Clips work best), and a Microtex 80/12 needle with a smooth thread like Superior Threads So Fine or Mettler Metrosene to make it easy to sew. In my testing, the So Fine thread and Microtex 80/12 won the challenge of the nicest stitch on microduoplex, and as long as my presser foot completely covered the seam allowance, I found it just as easy to sew as quilting cotton. I moved the needle to the right to set my seam allowance at 1/4" since my presser foot is a bit wide. I find it works well to saturate the lace with liquid starch and let it dry before laying out your pattern pieces and cutting your fabric. This stiffens the lace until you wash it and the lace has enough body to behave well in the sewing process.
We offer all these pins, clips, needles and thread here on our site.