Ballroom Seamstress

I took up sewing about a year ago with the express purpose of one day being able to sew my own dance costumes for Latin and ballroom dance competitions and exhibitions. At the time, I had no idea what I was getting in for, but my creative drive wouldn't let the thought rest, and I was—quite literally—faced with confronted with the desire for following through with this ambition every day of my life.

 I am a professional ballroom dancer and dance instructor, and so I spend over 40 hours a week immersed in the world of dance. While my job classifies me as a "professional dancer," I will fully admit that I'm far outside the realm of pro competitors; I didn't move out of the realm of hobby dancer and start training professionally until my late twenties. There's a lot of catching up that I'll probably never do considering that the best ballroom dancers in the world win their championships in the teens and twenties. Teaching is central focus of my career, and I'm pretty darn awesome at teaching the Average Joe how to stand out on a dance floor of his fellow Joes. 

But as my client list grows, so do the interests and ambitions of my students. As my students see their dancing moving beyond the casual niteclub or wedding floor to exhibitions and competitions, my role—and thus, my persona—must change in order to continue meeting their needs. Looking "the part" is a huge part of my profession, and I take pride in putting forth a professional appearance that fulfills their fantasy of the ballroom dancing world.

Unfortunately, being a ballroom dancing teacher is far from the most lucrative profession in the world. Running a full-time dance studio involves an incredible sum total of overhead costs; I see very little of the money my students pay for lessons. I often say that if I weren't a dance teacher, I couldn't afford to pay for the lessons that I teach. Dance costumes can cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the design, a cost that is certainly outside of my price range.

Why not, then, simply buy a ball gown at any ordinary store? Well, a lot of people do. Students and teachers alike often where regular cocktail dresses or full-length gowns to exhibitions and events, but when the level of dancing moves away from the merely social and into the stylized and professional, those ordinary gowns no longer suffice.

The limitations of ordinary ready-to-wear dresses are in the fundamentals of their construction. Have you ever hit the dance floor at a wedding and discovered that your dress would ride up or bunch up when you moved a certain way? Or maybe you kept stepping on your train? Perhaps you found yourself constantly tugging strapless dress up, or yanking a mini-dress down. The ballroom dancer simply cannot be burdened by these annoyances. Not only is it uncomfortable, but it ruins the aesthetic of any dancing presentation.

My first step was to look for patterns. My mother and, to a greater extent, my grandmother knew their way around a sewing machine, and so I had been exposed to sewing at a young age and had even attempted a few pattern-based garment projects over the years. But with the exception of one McCall's pattern, I found nothing.

The next step was to check out the internet, where I found more information, but it was sparse and hard to find, resigned to snippets in random blog entries and message board posts written by people who were themselves dabblers just like me. It would seem that of those people who practice dancesport, either as a profession or a hobby, the number who also sew and are willing to go to the time and effort to make true ballroom dance costumes, is relatively slim. In other words, the craft of sewing dancesport costumes is not a hot topic on the internet. Most of the methods of dancesport sewing are known by the professionals who sew dancesport gowns, without much motivation to share them elsewhere.

I did, however, manage to glean a few valuable pieces of information—both from the internet and from folks at the studio with more experience in competitions and exhibitions that I had—to get me started. First, a proper dancesport gown must be made of four-way (also called two-way) stretch material, preferably lycra-based. Second, a true dancesport dress has an internally constructed bodysuit and, for women, sewn in bra cups. Finally, I discovered a recommendation online from a hobby dancer/seamstress to read Kwik Sew's Swim & Action Wear, and apply the techniques described therein to the construction of dancesport dresses. I was ultimately underwhelmed by the insights this book provided, but in retrospect, I learned an essential dress-construction method that I was unfortunately slow to put into practice. Since then, I have learned to appreciate the importance of using elastic to seal all outer edges of of my dancesport garments. 

Ultimately, I found two commercially available patterns in active production (there are some out-of-print patterns available, too, if you can find them) for dancesport dresses. The first was the aforementioned McCall's pattern, 5136, which I have since used a number of times, and the second was Burda 7879, which I have not yet attempted sewing at the time of this writing. Both of these patterns left a lot to be desired in terms of my personal style, but they were at least a starting point.

It was from this point that I started in on teaching myself to sew. I didn't tackle dancesport sewing right away, but rather got myself re-acclimated to the process of sewing with a few "very easy" and "easy" patterns for everyday clothing. Despite the ease of the patterns, this process was a steep climb for me. My project ambitions quickly exceeded my mother's casual sewing expertise, and so I was on my own with a collection of library books, pattern directions, and the occasional off-hand comment from the ladies at the fabric store. My first project was a simple Butterick knit shirt (5084) that now takes me 3 or 4 hours from cut to hem, but that took me closer to 15 hours all told in that first go. For most of the first six months after that first project, the biggest obstacle to my sewing was finding the time and ambition to do it. The length of time it took me to complete projects was so daunting that I did not get many projects accomplished. Finally, over the summer, my sewing skills caught up further with my expectations, and a more realistic outlook prompted me to look for simpler and less time-consuming patterns. But these patterns were not for dancesport, except insomuch as I could wear the clothes to work and they would be comfortable and stylish for both practice and lessons.

My first foray into dancesport sewing was last January, when our studio owner decided it was time I do a pro-show at Spring Showcase. It was an arduous process and my novice mistakes only made it longer. From hand-sewing the leg elastic because I didn't know what machine needle to use, to almost melting my dress on a too-high iron setting, the project was exhausting, and ultimately a bit disappointing. The dress came together successfully, but it was ultimately plain, despite an attempt at beading. Certainly it was a far cry from the costumes sported by many of the other women, students and professionals alike, at our local showcase. A second attempt at a latin dress, this one self-designed with the McCall's pattern as a guide, remains unfinished after an overly ambitions decision to cover it in homemade beaded fringe.

But this fall, a year from when I started, with renewed skills and more realistic expectations, I am tackling dancesport costuming again. Along with my fashion sewing for everyday dancing, my experience learning dancesport are detailed in this log.