A Nude tee-shirt bra

I suddenly realised that my only proper tee-shirt bra is dark grey and therefore not very practical to wear under light-coloured summer tops. It’s been a while since I have made any lingerie, so it was a good time to take out my bra stuff and make something pretty and useful.

My previous grey tee-shirt bra had some lace to it but this time I wanted a really simple one.

Making the tee-shirt bra cups

I had somehow ended with two pairs of size 32 foam cups. After some consideration, I decided to use them instead of the size 34 I generally use. If they worked, fine, if they didn’t then I had learned a lesson! One thing I have learned is that it is almost impossible to find nude lycra fabric around here. However, I had some scraps of panty fabric from my previous bra project and the piece was just big enough to cover the cups.

The first thing to do was to stretch the fabric over the cups and mark the edges. Then I was able to cut out the lycra pieces. I added about 5 mm seam allowance to the top edge and as much as I could to the other edges. I sewed the fabric on the wrong side of the cup with a tiny seam allowance and then trimmed the extra fabric away:

At this point I had a little stroke of ingenuity and I realised I could sew the bra straps on at this stage. This would make the strap fastening stitches invisible from the right side. I sewed the straps on like this:

Then I just pulled the lycra cup covering over the cup hiding the stitches. Pulling the fabric over the top edge of the foam cup creates perfect top edge for the tee-shirt bra. However, I don’t like finishing the cup sides this way since that creates ugly puckering corners at the top of the cup. Instead I turned the fabric over the cup side and sewed it neatly to the inside of the foam cup:

Finishing the bra

After the cups were done, I started thinking about the rest of the bra. I had just used all my nude fabric to cover the cups and I didn’t have any matching fabric to complete the bra. The only thing to do then was to head out to the mall to get another pair of panties!

I used the Pin-up Girls Amanda/Alyssa pattern to cut the band out of the panty lycra. However, I then switched to the MakeBra method and only enforced the middle of the bridge with some stabilizer fabric.

I had to lower the wings at the cup side for about 2 cm since my cups were now smaller. To compensate, I changed the underwire shape and chose an underwire that wasn’t as curved as the one I use normally. (I have a stash of different underwires that I have saved from old bras I have thrown away.) This made the smaller cup fit better.

The only thing that didn’t colour-match perfectly was the hook-and-eye closure. I used a closure that I dyed pale pink a long time ago because the colour was closest to the bra colour I had. In the picture, the colour looks even more pink than it really is but I admit that I can still easily see the colour difference.

As I already had something pink, I decided to go for it and added a pale pink bow to the front. I also added a little sparkly bit under it to decorate otherwise plain bra.

The finished bra

Despite my initial doubts, this bra fits. The cups are a bit smaller and I have to see whether the band will start creeping upwards at the back to compensate. However, this bra feels comfortable and I will be certainly wearing it a lot!

I hope you liked this post and will be inspired to make yourself some pretty lingerie, too! Happy sewing!

Katja