Ballroom Seamstress

The new year marks a new chapter in my sewing of dancesport gowns. After two years of honing my craft I am taking on my first paid commission.

The commission comes from my co-worker Jessica, who has recently returned to ballroom dancing after a year-long stint in a different career. Unfortunately for her, when she left ballroom dancing in favor of a career change, she did not figure on wanting to return and gave away or sold off many of her dancesport gowns. When love of dance and boredom of office work drew her back into professional dancing, she knew she would have to rebuild her dance wardrobe.

After some casual consultation, we arrived at a rough sketch of an off-shoulder gown that would form the basic dress. After sifting through some pictures of dresses online, Jessica picked out a drape to go with the basic dress. Finally, we came to the task of picking out fabric. Jessica expressed an interest in a brown color palette to complement her pale, brunette coloring. I was worried that some browns might be drab or uninteresting for a latin dress, but luckily I had one particular fabric in mind.

As usual, my go-to source for stretch fabrics is Fabric.com. At the time, they still had a wide selection of colors in one of my very favorite fabrics, Nylon Tactel. I had worked with the Maroon shade before and knew that it had just enough of a reddish tone to give the predominantly brown color pizazz for a latin dress.

The next challenge was sizing. I had only ever made dancesport dresses for myself before this commission, and so I was a bit apprehensive to design a dress to fit another person. On the one hand, dancesport dresses are made of four way stretch fabric, and so they can often work for a range of sizes. Often, dress rental or resale sites list dress sizes by the range they accommodate, rather than assigning one size or another. On the other hand, dancesport dresses are made to fit very close to the body, so a bit too large or small in the wrong place could be disastrous.

After taking Jessica's measurements, they turned out to be similar enough to my own that I brought in a basic dance dress I had made for myself to check the fit before I started designing. The dress turned out to be a good fit for the bust, wait and hips, but what I hadn't anticipated was the difference in torso length. Jessica is only a couple inches shorter than I am, and I had figured with the elastic and stretch fabric, those couple inches wouldn't matter much, but in fact the dress bunched up at her middle in a way that couldn't have been fixed even by shortening the straps. The good news was, I could use my default dress-with-bodysuit pattern for Jessica, but it needed some adjustment, so I took a wild guess-timate and shortened all the basic pattern pieces by an inch before beginning the design process. 

Luckily, my first commission also coincided with my first dress form—a timely Christmas present from my parents. Even before I had received any inquiries from folks interested to commission me for dancesport design, I had reached a point in my sewing where I felt an acute need for a dress form. To a certain extent, being my own dress form is a good thing; I have learned how important it is to try on clothing during the sewing process to assess fit and the dress form does not completely substitute for real life try-on. However, there are certain aspects of sewing and tailoring that turn out to be near impossible when wearing one's own dress. I didn't want to lug every dress or skirt over to my mom's house every time I needed to hem so I could stand on her ottoman and let her measure up the hem with pins. And so I was excited to get my new dress form, a Singer DF150, size small. 

So far, this dress form has treated me well. The only trouble I've had with it are that the adjustment dials hit a limit when there is an unusual discrepancy between two adjacent measurements; try to dial up a 33" bust and a 31" waist (the small and large limits of this particular form) and one of the measurements will snap up or down a size. This isn't a big issue for me, since the dress form works fine with my measurements, and I work mainly with stretch fabrics. Real-life try-on plus forgiving stretch fabrics ensure a proper fit, while the dress form still serves as a useful mannequin. 

It was especially useful in working attaching the drape of this dress, but not so useful in marking up the hem. Because dancesport dresses have a built-in bodysuit, and the dress form doesn't approximate the whole length and shape of the torso, the crotch of the bodysuit is stretched across the full cut-off hip. When I attempted to hem the basic dress, it gave me the illusion that I had more skirt length than I actually did, and so I didn't mark the hem far enough down in back, and the skirt would ride up on Jessica when she tried it on. Not good for dancing freestyles with students (or anybody, yikes!). Luckily I'd saved the skirt section after I had cut off. It was still sewn together at the exact size of the tube skirt to which it had previously belonged. That, and it was a little longer on one side, and a little shorter on the other (from having marked the hem higher in the front and lower in the back), and so after removing the elastic rolled hem from the bottom of the too-short skirt, I reattached the tube piece with the longer (originally cut away from the front) section in back and the shorter (originally cut away from the back) section in the front, then elastic hemmed the bottom. The result? I shaped tube skirt with the inverted pieces acting dart-like the fit the hips. No more riding up!

I was a little nervous heading into this project to work with draping fabric. I had only ever made straightforward form-fitting dresses without any overlay. Jessica, however, had gravitated toward dresses with draping overlays while scouring photos in the design process, and so a drape it would be. Luckily I had stocked up on some extra of her fabric, just in case my first attempt at the drape was a disaster. It turned out to be pretty simple. The drape was fundamentally two large triangles front and back, gathered at the shoulder, narrow-hemmed and attached to the dress at each hip to form the desired effect. The only unexpected consequence was that the slit-open drape sections on the side that did not have the triangle tales were a little flappy at first. I had to cut them and re-hem them to match them up with the contours of the dress. 

The last big challenge of the Jessica dress was the open shoulder. I had never designed an off-shoulder dress before, and in designing the pattern pieces I simple created a smooth diagonal from the shoulder to the armpit. With the dress substantially done, Jessica complained that it felt like her womanly assets might just pop out of that side when she danced. The strap couldn't be tightened any further without making the dress lop-sided. I debated over possible fixes. I considered crossing the straps in back, changing the strap orientation on one side to halter... but all of those fixes had a fatal downside.

In the meantime, I began the design work on a new smooth dress. I wanted to make this new dress off-shoulder, and given the issues Jessica was having, I designed this one differently so that there was not a straight diagonal, but rather the neckline had a bit of a rise where the strap would be. It turned out great and I cursed myself for not having thought of it when designing Jessica's dress. You live, you learn, right? But the perfectionist in me would not let it go. Jessica was a paying customer (all be it with a friend/co-worker/design-guinea-pig discount). I couldn't make a dress for her that was any less than I would make for myself.

After much deliberation and measuring, I designed pattern pieces from the scraps of Jessica's original dress cuts to sew into the current dress to make it just like the new dress I had just designed. It was a tricky procedure. I had to rip out more of the current neckline, along with the elastic to get down the the raw edges so that I could sew on the make-up pieces, both to the front of the dress and to the bodysuit, make sure they matched up with each other and blended into the neighboring parts of the dress. I was essentially revising my old pattern piece after the dress was finished. Luckily my calculations were correct, and apart from a short seam (which would be covered on the outside with rhinestones) the addition was unnoticeable. 

When all was said and done, I finished the dress by stoning it on the bodice, and on the triangle-point drape with 20ss and 16ss crystal stones, and on the dress with 16ss smoked topaz stones. See upcoming posts for more on the stoning process.