Lavender Latin Drape
I've started designing a new Latin dress. The inspiration behind this dress is, in a way, two fold.
I frequently purchase athletic stretch fabrics in bulk when I find them on sale. I recently purchased a large amount of medium-weight, four-way stretch fabric in a unique color of salmon red in order to make a dress for planned Paso routine. However, the amount of this fabric available to purchase didn't quite get me to the minimum $35 for free shipping at Fabric.com. It's never a bad idea to stock up on high performance fabric when it's available, so I included a few yards of some yellow and some lavender fabric in my order. Once the fabric is in my house, then it's on my mind, and I always have it referenced for potential projects. This time, the lavender was stirring with me.
The second motivation for this dress is wanting to try a new style that I haven't worked with before. Looking at fashion media for inspiration, I've been intrigued lately by dress styles with fuller coverage drapey tops and form-fitting mini-skirts. It's not necessarily a dress style that would be my first choice for the next showcase or competition on my schedule, but by the same token, purple is not one of my favorite wardrobe colors. And so the idea came to me to try out this new dress design that's night quite my style with a fabric that's not quite my color. Call it a second best dress, if you will.
The challenge in creating the drape top is in fashioning a large pattern piece for cutting it. I debated whether to use the natural bias drape of the rectangular fabric, simply wrapping it around my dressform and then figuring out where to cut, but that seemed a bit willy-nilly for my taste, and so I cut a large rectangular piece of fabric on the fold of the fabric with a neckline to match the off-shoulder bodysuit, and then cut additional fabric off the back side of the piece so that the back of the dress would be a bit bare. I ended up with a fairly enormous piece of fabric, and I worried that the sleeves might be too bulky (which they yet may be; the dress isn't far enough along to tell), but it worked out well because the pattern piece turned out to be precisely the width (wrist to hip) of the 60" fabric, so it was an economical cut.
I knew I wanted the skirt and the drape top to be two separate pieces, however, I wasn't sure whether to attach them to each other, or to attach the skirt first to the bodysuit. I eventually settled on attaching the skirt to the bodysuit because I worried that the skirt would ride up if it were independent of the bodysuit, given the unstable nature of the drapey top. Besides which, I wanted to be able to anchor the drape top to the bottom half of the dress with a contrast belt in such a way that it would be stretched in front and not blouse at the belt. The only downside I foresaw with attaching the skirt to the bodysuit rather than the top was that the blouse effect might happen anyway if a lady shorter than me wore the dress... an issue always in the back of my head, an inevitable side effect, I suppose, of working on a dress project that's not necessarily for me, but not specifically for anyone else. Ultimately, the risk that it would blouse all the time if not attached to the bodysuit was enough that I decided it was better to make sure, at least, it did not blouse on me.
I cut out the skirt, sewed it together at the sides and attached it first to the back of the bodysuit at the low backline. Then I finished the edges of the bodysuit in an elastic narrow hem, attached the front of the drape top to the neckline of the bodysuit with an elastic narrow hem, and finally, sewed the elastic straps in place once all the narrow-hemming had been complete. The elastic narrow hem was a little tricky in places, as some areas of the outside edge of the dress were only bodysuit, and some were bodysuit and dress, and I wanted the elastic to be continuous from one to the other. It worked out well in the end, and upon assembling the bones of the dress, I was able to try it on to safety-pin the front part of the skirt to its best height on the bodysuit front. I sewed the skirt in place to the front of the bodysuit with simple zig-zag stick, as it would not be visible in the finished product.
Now came the fitting of the drape. This was the first time I had ever worked on a project where I got the dress mostly assembled before cutting out one of the pattern pieces, namely the contrast belt. The belt would need to fit the upper hips snugly and I wanted to be able to measure the precise place where the drape top ended and the belt would be attached before designing the pattern piece. It was a good thing, too, because when I got the partially-assembled dress on my dressform, I discovered that I had estimated the drape to be too long by about an inch and a half. I removed an inch and a half from the entire bottom of the drape piece, resewed the sleeve, put it back on the form and measured. The belt would be fairly easy to design (a rectangular strip of fabric to be folded and attached to the bottom drape edge), as long as I had the correct measurements. I have my pattern piece now, and first on tomorrow's agenda is cutting out the belt fabric.
