Wearing my Corset

Today I decided to wear my corset to work, over a shirt and under a jacket to see how it was. I also had to show some people who wanted to see it. I thought it would be a good test as well to see if it was wearable before having to wear it for several hours with no opportunity to remove it if I dressed up in costume.

So far I have found out the following; see the list below arranged in order of comfort and convenience, from most to least:
  • standing, walking, eating, drinking - perfectly normal
  • walking quickly up slight incline, running up a flight of stairs - want to breathe slightly more than average
  • sitting in normal chair - slightly more restricted breathing
  • tying shoelaces - have to do something bizzare to reach foot
  • sitting in bucket seats in car - rather more restricted breathing that annoys me, but not enough to make me feel faint or anything
  • putting on socks - hard to get foot high/close enough to both hands to put socks on (both hands because not to hard to get foot to one hand at side, but socks are very hard to do one-handed)
Basically, one cannot bend in the middle, and one cannot breathe deeply. I like to breathe deeply and breathe with my stomach I think, so this is annoying. I'm not sure if it is easier if you breathe by lifting your shoulders while wearing the corset because I can't seem to work out a sensible way of doing that. Basically though, I think breathing is easier if you shift your breathing motion down to the abdomen or up to the top of the chest, because the middle section of the torso is constricted so that doesn't work too well.
Otherwise, it is not actually uncomfortable in any way, but is way better when standing up, or kneeling rather than sitting. HOWEVER, I have just thought that I am wearing rather tight fitting jeans which means that the area below and at the bottom of the corset is more restricted than it would be with just the corset, so it might be more comfortable with looser clothes in that area. I will try it later.
The annoying thing is that it is not laced very tightly, and I read that you should be able to reduce waist circumference by 10% if you do it sensibly and don't want to do "tight-lacing", by which you can reduce 20%. Except, I think that with the layers of the corset I might just be the same around the waist as I was. Maybe. And it seems to be more constricting around the mid-chest than around the waist, so maybe it is not the ideal shape? Who knows. Maybe I am not the ideal shape? :0 ;)

So, there we go.

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