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.

Posted by S.K. Slevinski at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You might not imagine that Halloween costume sewing and dancesport sewing have much in common. Typically, Halloween costumes are made of lower quality fabrics to keep costs down on an outfit meant to be worn for one night a year, or perhaps even just one night in a lifetime. On Halloween, it is permissible to wear garments and accessories that don't fit quite right, or that look generally inauthentic, because as long as the general idea of our costumes get communicated to fellow party-goers, we have made a successful go of dressing up for the holiday. 

As a seamstress, I take pride in producing quality garments, no matter what the occasion, though I will admit that the "one night" aspect of Halloween affects the gusto of my drive for authenticity. This Halloween, I had two sewing projects, one large and one small.

The large project was my main Halloween costume. My boyfriend and I decided to have another try at couples costuming, given a pretty successful foray the year before as He-Man and She-ra. Most elements of those costumes had been purchased; I had the good luck to find an adult She-ra costume online. I had to alter the bra cups, which were enormous for a medium, and cover the area where the inside straps were attached with t-shirt scraps because the gold accents were so itchy. When nothing suitable could be found, either from costume shops or from thrift stores, for He-Man's breast plate, I fashioned one out of faux-suede upholstery fabric and red felt.

This year we struggled to find a good idea. Feasibility is always a concern with Halloween costumes. We've often talked about dressing up as Link and Zelda, but it would be very hard to put those costumes together, and would probably involve much labor-intensive design and sewing on my part. My sewing skills and available free time don't add up to Link and Zelda just get. It was important, also, to choose a couples costume that reflected our interests and personalities; any old costume that can be bought at a store in a couples package won't do. After a bit of debate, we arrived at an idea that was both palatable and do-able: Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six from the new Battlestar Galactica.

The only problem with Gaius and Six was making the costumes recognizable. We had resigned ourselves to the fact that people who had never seen the show would simple not recognize us. Thus we had to do our best to be authentic to as many details as possible so that fans of the show would pick up on our identities easily. The danger was that our costumes would look too ordinary; we didn't want to be just a guy in a suit and a lady in a red dress. We found some photos on the internet of fans who had gone this route for a couples costume who ended up doing precisely that, but we also found some more successful attempts, and used those for ideas.

After searching the websites of standard commercial sewing pattern producers for a pattern that could be used or adapted for a Six-like dress, I came up with nothing. Given the the problem of being recognizable, and the lack of reasonable facsimiles, I decided to design the dress myself so that it would look as much like the original as possible. I found a couple of photos online of Six-dress replicas that had been made as costumes, and one in particular that included a description of a few of the challenges faced by the seamstress. After studying these dresses, plus photos of the real Six dress, I developed an initial plan, including some things I wanted to keep, and some I decided to eliminate.

I wanted to retain the seam across the fullest part of the bust, which was not included in all of the replicas I saw. I liked it for it's decorative aspect, and because I could use it as something of a lateral dart to shape the bodice. I decided to get rid of the waist-line seam from the original, because, while it is hardly visible on the dress tailored to Trisha Helfer, it was a little too visible in some of the replicas, and I don't like when dresses visually cut across the middle. I also decided not to bother with a zipper or the seamless sides. The side slits would be easier to make with side seams, and I didn't deem that it would affect the authenticity of the costume's appearance with any significance. As for the zipper, I figured that since I had decided to use four-way stretch fabric, why bother?

Essentially, I had three pattern pieces (not including the straps) after the initial design: the upper bodice, and the dress front and back. After sewing together these three elements and trying the dress on, I discovered two things. First, I would need a lining, because every detail of my underwear showed through the clingy fabric. I had decided to use Dryflex high performance 4-way stretch knit, partly because it was on sale at Fabric.com, and because they had two colors of red that I liked. This decision was good and bad. I very much enjoyed working with the Dryflex, and have since bought up a bunch of this fabric for future projects. On the downside, it doesn't have the kind of drape I would have liked for a slinky dress. I'm going to try cutting it on the bias for making skirts in the future, but for the Six dress, I just consoled myself with the inherent imperfection of Halloween costumes and kept working. Secondly, in the first try-on, I discovered that I had forgotten to add an upper seam allowance to the back dress piece, and so I would have to open the cut outs a little wider at the bottom to compensate. As a result, the side cut-outs would be larger than the dress from the show. I resolved that I would just have to show a little more skin than Six, and I took my pattern pieces to some red Jet Set, a fairly thin stretch knit readily available at the local Joann, to make the lining. 

The next task was to finish the cut-outs and neck line. My first attempt was to make slender facings out of the Dryflex and sew them to the dress and lining in a method similar to how I would use bias-tape as an inside facing. That worked out okay, but the points of the cut-outs weren't strong enough and thus didn't retain their shape as well as I wanted. I decided, then, to use regular bias tape on the inside of these facings to reinforce them. That method worked to reinforce the shape, but the dress still had a tendency to open up at the cut-outs when I moved, making the dress look a little bunched-up. At last I decided to try one final strategy to make the cut-outs stay in place. I ripped out the cut-out and neck-line seams one last time and replaced the internal bias tape with elastic, finishing the edges just as I would a ballroom dancesport dress. Finally, the cut-outs didn't bunch, and the dress hugged my body.

While the Six Dress was my main concern this Halloween, I did end up with a side project. Our annual Halloween party at work was on Friday the 30th. My costume creativity was largely sapped, and I knew I could not wear the Six costume. There aren't enough sci-fi nerds at the studio to recognize it, especially without my Gaius Baltar, and so I knew I had to wear something else. In the end, I recycled my She-ra outfit from last year (I had worn something different to the work party last year), but realized I would be dancing, and thus face different costuming dilemmas.

The cape would simply have to be dealt with, nothing for it; my spins would just have to be more conservative. The skirt was also a problem, as it would clearly flare out when I spun, leaving people with a full view of my posterior, but ballroom dancers have tackled that problem before. I simply bought a pair of spandex boy shorts to wear underneath. My last problem was trickier. There was no way I could dance for four hours in the boots I'd worn last year. They were high-heeled platforms, and had given my feet a lot of trouble last year, even not dancing in them. Additionally, it would be, of course, ideal to wear dance shoes for this event, since I would be expected to spent the evening dancing with our students. Investing in dance boots for one night was not high on my list of options.

I decided, instead, to create some faux-boots. Something that would fit over my leg, giving the illusion of boots, while still leaving my feet free to wear dance shoes. I scoured my fabric in storage and found some cream-colored moleskin leftover from an old project. There was just enough to fit the bill, and so I formulated a plan. I found an unused sleeve pattern from a project in my pattern library. I traced the sleeve that was a couple sizes larger than my usual shirt size, and took a few informal measurements. I reduced the curve of the sleeve cap, since it reached much higher over my knee than a boot would. I shorted the bottom appropriately, and flared it so that it would have some extra room around the top of my foot.

After cutting out pieces of moleskin from my modified pattern, I machine basted one and tried it on. I decided to bring the seam in a little tighter so that the boots would hug my calves better and not fall down (the moleskin had a bit of stretch, so the fit needed to be snug). I sewed the pattern pieces together down the sleeve seam, but left a few inches open at the end for my heel. I hemmed the bottoms and the heel vents, and then applied fusible interfacing to the round top of the boots to give them structure. Finally, I finished the tops of the boots with leftover red bias tape as an accent... and voila! Fake boots. To my relief, they crept down only a little as I danced; I had to fix them only a couple times during the night.   

Posted by S.K. Slevinski at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.  

Posted by S.K. Slevinski at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)