A new bra!

It is kind of finished... I may add shoulder straps later if I manage to find the right kind of elastic in the right colour. I have nice edge elastic in this sage green but so far, I have not been able to find a good match for straps.

Unbelievably, I bought this lace as far back as four years ago (which I found out thanks to my old blog posts). I found it at my local haberdashery store (the one owned by the same people who run my favorite market stall). They sometimes carry lingerie lace and some elastics but they don't have all the supplies. I found some matching lycra, underwire casing and satin edge elastic when I visited Kantje Boord with Melissa but I didn't find anything for shoulder straps.
Using those supplies, I panties using Melissa's pattern, my first attempt at a self-drafted bra (which didn't really fit), a self-drafted pair of panties (using instructions from an excellent website about drafting lingerie patterns which has since disappeared from the internet) and a second, better bra.   

I have worn the panties and the second bra. However, thanks to the improvised shoulder straps and not-so-great choice of material for the cup lining, the bra was never really nice to wear.

So now, after all those years, I have made another one. This time using cut-and-sew foam for the cups. There's actually no lycra fabric at all in this bra. There's a bit of that left and I hope I will be able to come up with a design for panties which uses up every last scrap of lycra and lace (my normal go-to patterns won't work, I already tried).
Over the years, I've come to like this bra design: Horizontal cup seam, sewn foam, all lace on the outside. I have adjusted the fit and shape slightly over several versions. For example, I have abandoned the recommendation from my lingerie pattern making book to raise the center front on a strapless bra by 1 cm. With my cup size, there is really no difference in the level of control whether I do that or not and the look of the bra is much nicer with the slightly lower center front (more curved). 

I used grey underwire casing and a grey closure for this bra. The colour doesn't quite match but it doesn't bother me in those places. I have grey shoulder strap elastic but that really didn't look right...
Oh, and so far, I've always topstitched some tape or bias binding to the raw edge of the foam cups but this time I stitched it to the outside and sewed the inside by hand. I hoped this would give a smoother finish and it does. It is by no means a "normal" lingerie sewing technique but if it works?!?
All I have to do now is come up with that panty design...