I’ve been thinking about binding a bit because there’s a cool binder initiative in NZ that’s running a crowd-funding campaign at the moment, and it’s got me thinking about how amazing this would have been to have access to when I was a student. I still have to save up to get binders, but having them sent to my parents house in America has made things heaps easier for me.
This is part one of two – second half will be up on Monday!
If some of the panels look familiar – it’s because I borrowed them from a comic I did way back in 2011.
This is a great project! I also live in a non-US country where binders can be hard to come by…so I started making them myself. 😀 Of course, I’ll never be able to make them as cheap as those ebay binders, but I’m mostly making them as a hobby, too. It’s fun to develop different models. (I think I got something of a special interest in binders tbh. I don’t even wear them myself anymore because I have back problems.)
Ohhh cool – yeh I’ve work with friends to try and make them – but they’ve never worked well! (next week’s strip has more about that). How have yours turned out??
It’s working out quite well! It was tricky to find the right fabric; I expected I could order it online but I actually had to ask 15 local fabric stores until I found one that sold it.
The secret is 70% lycra, 30% spandex. (Or something close to that, I have 80/20 and it works too) With that fabric it works alright, though not good enough for people with bigger chest sizes. I’ll be experimenting with non-elastic fabric in the front (and elastic fabric in the back) soon, GC2b style – maybe that’ll work.
And especially since I discovered shiny scaly fabrics, they are SUPER PRETTY. (this looks similar to what I use: http://www.spandexdepot.com/stores/images/4.black%20royal%20broken%20glas04.JPG)
Making the patterns was sheer luck – I found the WIP open-source program Valentina (http://valentinaproject.bitbucket.org/). Then I just had to figure out the factor that gets me from chest circumference to binder circumference by trial and error.
Right now I’m just making binders for my friends since I’m still testing and learning, but maybe some day when I have more spoons I’ll start selling them in my country…or teach someone else how to do it because I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever have *that* many spoons, and I don’t really want to be self-employed forever.
Man, I hope these two links don’t drop my comment into spam filter hell. 😀