Ballroom Seamstress

I'm working on a new Smooth dress for Spring Showcase. The design grew out of a variety of circumstances and inspirations.

The idea first started because I was thinking that I needed to come up with some wardrobe elements for Country Western dancing. At the last Showcase, I wore my Smooth wardrobe for C/W because the country dancing came right after smooth. I wasn't sure if I'd have time to change, otherwise I could have worn jeans, but after going to a national competition in the fall, I realized that having dancesport wardrobe for country western will be essential as I go forward. I didn't relish the thought of wearing a button-down cowboy shirt, and so I wondered if I might just wear a more casual-looking bejeweled shirt with jeans. It would, at least, suffice for the meantime. 

The more I thought about this bejeweled shirt, the more I wondered, what if it had a matching skirt? I had made a smooth skirt as a separate piece previously and was quite happy with the result. Slowly but surely it came to me... if I had a smooth gown in two pieces, I could easily change out of the skirt and into jeans for C/W, or vice versa. If the skirt were detached, I could even change in a semi-public place, if need be, pulling the jeans on underneath and then taking the skirt off over the jeans once I was dressed. I didn't need a proper bodysuit for Smooth freestyles, after all, there wouldn't be any athletic choreography with my students, just syllabus material. 

The skirt design was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I would simply use the skirt pattern and method I had used before. It would be the top piece that would anchor the outfit, and it would need to be something that would look elegant for smooth, but somewhat casual for country. It would also need to work well with the jeans, color-wise. Blue was out, it would look washed out with the jeans. I didn't want to do pink, because I was already working on a pink latin dress. Green would result in almost the same problem as blue. I toyed with red, but I'm reluctant to make red dresses because red is a pretty typical dress color, and thus doesn't stand out as well in freestyles.    

After acquiring several yards of a few different colors of stretch nylon fabric on clearance at Fabric.com, I weighed my options. Clearly my best choice was a stunning goldenrod color that would stand out against the jeans, but also stand out as a smooth dress for freestyles. The only problem is that orange and yellow aren't really my colors with my fair, pink-ish skin and blond hair. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to break out the fake tanner once again.

In designing the all important detached top for this dress, I decided on an off-shoulder style. It could be potentially very easy to design, with nearly identical pattern pieces front and back. However, having a lot of fabric on the back of the dress means having all the more space to fill with rhinestones. Besides, I've never minded back-less. The problem, however, is that it couldn't be backless so far down as to expose the waistband of the separate skirt, one of the pitfalls of making dance dresses in two pieces.

The more I thought, the more I gravitated toward the idea of a drape back. It would allow most of the back to be open, but it could cut across the back high enough to cover the skirt waistband. Since the dress would be two pieces and thus would not need a bodysuit, I decided to design the drape right into the back pattern piece, rather than adding a separate piece later, sort of like a cowl neckline. The trick was creating a misshapen pattern piece for the back that would attach to a regularly proportioned piece in front. This meant melding two parts of the back pattern together, first, a stable section from the upper-hips down, and then a widened section angling each side of the top back outward to create the extra fabric in between for the drape. I played with the angles several times before finally settling on a pattern piece that looked promising. I had an excess of fabric, and I'd gotten it cheaply, so I told myself I could try again if it turned out badly.

Over the weekend, I got all the pieces of the top assembled with the straps in place. Even though I didn't have a bodysuit, I wanted built-in bra cups, so I made the front piece of the top double-layered with flesh colored fabric underneath, finishing it with an elastic rolled hem in my usual fashion. I did a non-elastic narrow hem across the drape section, and then sewed the two pieces together. The initial results were promising, but once the straps were attached, and the drape sewn onto the shoulder, I discovered that the cowl-back was quite attractive. The end result was not as dramatic a drape as I had imagined, but otherwise everything I could have hoped for. All I have left is to finish the bottom in a satin trim to match the planned ivory trim of the skirt, and of course, to add the rhinestones.

Onward and upward to the matching skirt. 

Posted by S.K. Slevinski at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I took my latest rhythm dress to a stage of substantial completeness over the weekend. I just have to elastic hem the bottom of the underlying tube skirt, add a flesh-colored strap across the back, sew in the bra cups, and reinforce the straps at their attachment points. In other words, things I could do the week before Showcase, if need be.

All in all, this dress went smoothly. It was a fairly simple basic design using my go-to bodysuit/dress pattern. I enhanced the design in two places. I added a two-layered circular skirt and structured the dress to have an uneven side cut-out.

The most difficult part of the side cut-out was not making it too large or too low. Design items like cut-outs look so much smaller on the pattern pieces than they do on the body. When I first drew the cut-out, and then went to make a bodysuit pattern, I realized the bottom of the cut-out would be all of one inch from the top of the bodysuit leg. Yikes! I didn't want to show that much skin! So I taped more tissue back into the pattern piece and started again until I had a cut out that seemed like it would be the right mix of modest and saucy. 

When I first basted the bodysuit into the dress, however, the dress pulled the cut-out side a little lower than I wanted. What was happening? It seemed I was too tall for the pattern, but no, I had used the pattern before with good success. I realized then that maybe the pattern wasn't the right size after all... not the whole pattern, but rather, the bodysuit portion of the pattern. The dresses that I'd made before simply hadn't revealed the defect in my base pattern because they had always previously been symmetrical. The only evidence of it on my red dress was the legs of the bodysuit being a little higher than I expected (I had just assumed high-cut legs were the intention of the pattern).

I removed the basting stitches, tossed the bodysuit into my bag of substantial scraps and cut a new bodysuit, adding an inch of length to the pattern pieces above the leg holes and below the cut out. I sewed the new pieces, basted the bodysuit inside and voila! No uneven pull.

The only disappointment with the asymmetrical cut-out is that I had wanted more of a rounded ski-slope shape, rather than a semi-circle. The cut-out was fine before I sewed the elastic into it, but the elastic narrow hem pulls it into a semi-circle. It still looks good, but it's just not what I intended. I suppose if I ever want a particularly shaped cut-out in the future I'll have to use a different method of bodysuit/elastic attachment, perhaps attaching them with right-sides together.

The circular skirts were the most work. The first cut ended up being too big because I had used a circular skirt pattern from a different project and my measurements were off by a fourth of an inch. Better too large than too small. I corrected the skirt and then went to mark the place to attach it. Turned out that the skirt-marking tool on my dress form was not designed to mark a level line when attaching a skirt at hip-height. It would mark higher on the front and back than on the sides because it was designed to mark in a circle. Unluckily I did not have a yard stick at my apartment and so had to hold a measuring tape taut around the hips and eye it up before marking. The black contrast skirt was easier to attach because with the pink one already in place I had simply to line up the raw edge of the black with that of the pink.

I was on the fence about how next to proceed with my circular shirts. I knew I wanted a horsehair braid trim, but I was debating about whether simply to fold up the horsehair in a simple hem, or to add a satin trim. My last horsehair project was a plain black smooth skirt, and I still had a few yards of homemade black satin bias trim (plus enough 3-inch bias strips already cut to add enough trim for the circular skirt), which, in that project, had been necessary to hide the horsehair on the chiffon godet sections. I also had a fair bit of hot pink stretch satin in my substantial scraps bag from the bodice of a bridesmaid dress I made last spring. Two issues held me back, though. First, I had cut the black satin bias strips before I'd obtained a 2-inch bias tape maker. 3-inch wide bias strips are too small for the bias tape maker, and even if I cut the hot pink satin to the right size, the trim would be noticeably larger than the black satin trim. Adding trim meant that I would have to iron all the bias tape by hand, which amounts to three passes—first on the half fold, next one side folded in, and finally the other side folded in.

Well, I was feeling ambitious on Sunday night and decided to go for the satin trim. My next concern was how exactly to use the bias trim. Should I put the black satin on the black skirt and the hot pink satin on the pink skirt? Or should I do contrasting trim? Would the black on the pink skirt stand out enough against the black background of the skirt below it?

I decided to try for the contrasting trim. Luckily, the sheen of the satin plus the protruding nature of the horsehair sets off the black trim from the black skirt and gives the skirts a striped effect.

The only thing left to decide is if and how to add rhinestones!

Posted by S.K. Slevinski at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)