Friday, November 16, 2012

Shall we dance?

For the past several years, I've been helping sew and repair ballroom dance costumes for a local K-8 school.  This last spring, I ended up designing waltz dresses to be worn by the Junior High dancers.  
Ballroom dance dresses- simply elegant
Ballroom dance dress back

This is the design I settled on.  The instructors wanted gowns with full skirts and could be worn by ladies in 5th through 8th grades.  I wanted a design that could be sewn quickly and easily.

Bodice- I began with a basic leotard style top, ending with a drop waist.  The red dress is the prototype.  The instructors preferred a cap sleeve and rounded, raised neckline in back. There are only two pattern pieces for the bodice: a front and a back.

Skirt- The skirts are just one big circle, no seams, and a rounded, heart shaped cutout in the center.


 

The purple dress is the finished product.  I used 50 lb fishing line to make the hem curl.

Ballroom dance full circle skirt spins beautifully
Ballroom dance full circle skirt spins beautifully
 While basic in design, floats or other accessories can add interest to the costume.

The 7th & 8th graders who performed in the purple dresses also used matching fans and wore coordinating flowers in their hair.

Patterns and instructions

These will be available for purchase and download online through my web site in the near future (I hope):
www.sewpleasing.com

Sunday, October 14, 2012

This week I had the privilege of altering a dress for a little girl.  This project was unique in that it is the last dress this girl will ever wear in this life.  This is a link to her family's blog, but is in no way intended to imply their endorsement of my business:

http://mcdonaldfam.blogspot.com/

Until this week, I did not know Mia or any of her family.  A friend of mine referred me to them and helped with part of the alteration.

Altering clothing for a person who isn't present provides a unique challenge.  The dress chosen was the Elizabeth by Dressed in White.  Their smallest size is a 6 and Mia wears a 4T, so the first step was to find a child of similar size to serve as a model to ensure the best fit.  After communicating with the family and obtaining measurements that were a size smaller than the size we were looking for, I measured my 4 year old son and the 4 year old neighbor girl (both of whom are about Mia's age).

The dress needed to be shortened and taken in at the bodice.  This involved removing the zipper, undoing the bodice side seams, and removing the skirt from the bodice.  My friend did this part.  Once I had the dress pieces in hand, I put them on my neighbor and pinned them to fit.  I ended up not needing to shorten the skirt at all, just reattach it to the shortened bodice.  I did have to take in a couple pleats on the skirt to make it fit the re-sized bodice.  It only took about an hour or so to trim the bodice and sew it all back together.

Out of respect for the family, I did not take any pictures of the dress I worked on, but it turned out nicely and should fit well.

Here is a link I found:

http://www.giveforward.com/achangeofheart

I have always been a fan of organ donation and encourage all to support this way of saving lives.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Narnia: Prince Caspian Costumes

And here they are:

Prince Caspian Narnia costumes: Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy


 Over all, I was happy with how these costumes turned out. 
These were the costumes worn near the end of the movie,
 right before they returned to their own time and place.
Narnia Prince Caspian: Edmund

Narnia Prince Caspian: Peter



The Peter and Edmund costumes turned out just how I wanted them to. 


Narnia Prince Caspian: Lucy

Narnia Prince Caspian: Susan


One minor difficulty I ran into was finding fabric I liked for the Susan and Lucy costumes.  I settled for the closest fabrics I could find, and concentrated on imitating the styles as closely as possible.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Narnia costumes 2009 - Susan

Almost a year ago my oldest daughter Valerie watched Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and begged me to make one of Queen Susan's dresses for her. This project was exactly the sort I like, so I readily agreed and talked my other children into being Prince Caspian characters for Halloween. Halloween is now past and I'm finally ready to tell of the experience.

I will start with Valerie's costume, since I have pictures and it's been done since July.This is a screen shot from the movie. It gives you a good idea of what these costumes are supposed to look like when they are done. Valerie's costume is supposed to look like Susan's, second from the left.

I started by choosing a pattern that had similar lines the dress. I had on hand McCalls M5207, so this is what I used.

That was the easy part. The next step was the most difficult: choosing the fabric. This drove me nuts. I spent months trying to find fabric like the dress in the movie. Nothing came close, except for a pillowcase I came across at Down East Home after the dress was finished. I finally settled on an upholstery fabric I found at Wal-Mart for $2.00/yard.

I started with the overdress. Since Valerie is 9 and hasn't developed womanly curves yet, I was concerned about how to keep the dress up while she wears it. If I were to have made this for an adult, I would have used boning, for support and structure and relied on the woman's hips to hold the dress up. Since the fabric was already heavy, I opted to leave out the bones and didn't even bother to line it. I decided that I could add boning later, if needed.

Another decision I needed to make was how and wear to close it. I did some research, primarily at http://costumes.narniaweb.com/ I was able to glean some useful suggestions from the costume forums there. I decided to use hook & eye tape for a closure down the top part of the center front bodice, leaving the bottom open, like in the movie (just take my word for it, since I don't have a screen shot. To the right is one of the only instances that the back of the gown is visible in the movie. At first it looked like there was lacing in the back, but when seen closer, see below, it appears that there is some sort of button closure. I opted for lacing, to simplify things.










Having made these decisions, it was time to cut out the dress. While the fabric had a print, it was the same, whether viewed up or down, so I layed the pattern in both directions, to reduce waste.

For the top of the bodice, I just turned under the extra part of the pattern. As you can see, the fabric I chose is a little closer to the green part of the spectrum.

I cut the remaining pieces. In the meantime, Valerie decided to make the same dress for her Barbie. So I took a break to help her with the pattern and cutting. Her friend helped out. For the doll sized pattern, I took the instructions from the McCalls pattern and used the diagrams of the pieces, by enlarging them with the copy machine. Then I helped the girls pin the mini pattern pieces to scraps of fabric and let them cut them out.



























If you look carefully, you can see a drawing Valerie made of her vision of the Susan dress, hanging on the closet door.

















Now they are both cut out
I sewed half of the bodice and did the first fitting.
I determined that the bodice was too high both in the front and back, so I cut off the excess on the left half of the dress and used it as a pattern to cut off the excess from the right half of the dress.

Eli wanted to help, but, no.
To be continued...