The Jessica: Maroon Off-the-Shoulder Latin Dress with Front Drape
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 ta
iloring 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 a
nd 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 t
riangles 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 tightene
d 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.
ng with dress construction), but the bias tape maker allowed me to streamline the most labor-intensive part of the process, which is the ironing of the two edges inward. After that, folding the trim in half to iron was a simple process, and the tape was ready to go.
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 
en, 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.
ttach 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. 
The idea first started because I was thinking that I needed to come up with some wardrobe elements for Country Western dancing. At the last Showcase, I wore my Smooth wardrobe for C/W because the country dancing came right after smooth. I wasn't sure if I'd have time to change, otherwise I could have worn jeans, but after going to a national competition in the fall, I realized that having dancesport wardrobe for country western will be essential as I go forward. I didn't relish the thought of wearing a button-down cowboy shirt, and so I wondered if I might just wear a more casual-looking bejeweled shirt with jeans. It would, at least, suffice for the meantime. 
The skirt design was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I would simply use the skirt pattern and method I had used before. It would be the top piece that would anchor the outfit, and it would need to be something that would look elegant for smooth, but somewhat casual for country. It would also need to work well with the jeans, color-wise. Blue was out, it would look washed out with the jeans. I didn't want to do pink, because I was already working on a pink latin dress. Green would result in almost the same problem as blue. I toyed with red, but I'm reluctant to make red dresses because red is a pretty typical dress color, and thus doesn't stand out as well in freestyles. 
In designing the all important detached top for this dress, I decided on an off-shoulder style. It could be potentially very easy to design, with nearly identical pattern pieces front and back. However, having a lot of fabric on the back of the dress means having all the more space to fill with rhinestones. Besides, I've never minded back-less. The problem, however, is that it couldn't be backless so far down as to expose the waistband of the separate skirt, one of the pitfalls of making dance dresses in two pieces. 
Over the weekend, I got all the pieces of the top assembled with the straps in place. Even though I didn't have a bodysuit, I wanted built-in bra cups, so I made the front piece of the top double-layered with flesh colored fabric underneath, finishing it with an elastic rolled hem in my usual fashion. I did a non-elastic narrow hem across the drape section, and then sewed the two pieces together. The initial results were promising, but once the straps were attached, and the drape sewn onto the shoulder, I discovered that the cowl-back was quite attractive. The end result was not as dramatic a drape as I had imagined, but otherwise everything I could have hoped for. All I have left is to finish the bottom in a satin trim to match the planned ivory trim of the skirt, and of course, to add the rhinestones.
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. 
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. 
rts off with Smooth Freestyles and Routines. I didn't have any routines this time around, but I did have a number of freestyles throughout the day. Last showcase, I wore a store-bought, floor-length red dress, but this time I wanted to wear something I had sewed myself. I did not, however, want to fashion an entirely new dress with bodysuit, etc. because I was already working on such a ballgown for my professional routine at Showcase (more on that later). I simply cannot wear the same gown for student freestyles as I do for my professional routine. 
bit too sheer for my tastes. The sheerness wasn't an issue in my aforementioned ballgown, since it has an underskirt, but in the black skirt, it looks almost like there's nothing between my skirt sections when I spin around. Not the worst thing in the world; the godets don't go higher than mid-thigh, and I've seen long dancesport dresses made specifically with open skirt sections for leggy smooth dances, like the tango. 
l I tried it on in the mirror. The heaviness of the double knit ponte with the light, unstructured chiffon produced a droopy, shapeless column, not at all the flowing ballgown skirt I'd envisioned. Finishing the hem would give it some shape, I knew, but would a simple narrow hem be enough to give it the lift and profile I wanted?
What to do? I didn't want to have to wait until Monday to get bias tape from the fabric store, but I was close to done and didn't want to have to go to the effort of making my own trim. In the end, however, I was swayed by the fact that if I fashioned my own trim, I could use satin fabric, which would be a lot more attractive than matte store-bought bias tape; as an added bonus, I could get it done before the weekend was over. It turned out to be well worth the effort (unlike another attempt at trim that I tried later on my ball gown), and even without a bias tape maker of the correct size, the trim was easy to make. I cut two and a half inch wide bias strips of the satin fabric I had in my stores, then I ironed it in half, and finally tucked each side in as far as the fold, and ironed it that way. Voila! I had my own homemade, three-quarter inch satin bias tape. I sewed the horsehair to the inside of the raw edge of the skirt and then covered it up by sewing on the bias trim. The final effect was better than I could have hoped for.
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.
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.
After studying these dresses, plus photos of 
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 
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.
