Ballroom Seamstress

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!