Nude tee-shirt bra
My projects,  Sewing

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.

Covering tee-shirt bra 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:

Attaching the straps to the bra.

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 cup sides.

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.

My tee-shirt bra from the back.

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.

The bridge embellishments.

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

The finished tee-shirt 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

I am a mother of two. I sew, knit and create and blog about it.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: