Finishing Touches: Goldenrod Smooth and Lavender Latin
Two of my gowns in progress received their finishing touches in the last week, which is to say the finishing touches of gown construction. The details of adding rhinestones to these dresses are yet to come.
The first is my Goldenrod colored smooth dress. Last we checked in the dress was skirt-less and unfinished along the bottom edge of the separate top. I made a skirt according to my previous method, using more of the stretch nylon goldenrod fabric for the main skirt sections and then using ivory-colored nylon chiffon tricot (from Fabric.com) for the triangular godet sections. I decided to use a contrasting color for the godets because I had used that chiffon before and liked working with it, but it did not come in any shade closer to yellow. Also, I like to use contrast whenever possible, and using ivory chiffon allowed me to coordinate with ivory satin trim for both the skirt and the top.
Making the satin trim for this dress, I used my 2-inch bias tape maker for the first time. It turned out to be a great advantage over making bias trim by hand. It's still a time-consuming process (as is everythi
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.
The essential finishing touch of the skirt was this ivory satin bias trim in conjunction with a horsehair braid. I've found horsehair to be an essential ingredient in the construction of smooth gowns and even some Latin. It give the skirt shape like nothing else; it is no wonder that almost all the smooth dresses from vendors at the last competition I went to were finished with horsehair braid.
My lavender Latin dress was all put together, but for a faux belt in a contrasting color of white. This belt is essentially a long strip of fabric, reinforced with elastic fusible interfacing, sewed together at the ends and then folded in half. The only tricky part was making sure that the strip was precisely the correct length for fitting the hips at the point where the drape top would end. When the contrast belt was cut and fused, I fitted the drape top by pulling the sloped edges taut around my dressform, safety-pinning them together after angling them as needed to make it lay as I wanted it to across the dress. I trimmed away the excess edges and then basted the overlapping sloped edges together. From there, I sewed on the folded contrast belt, adding interest and finishing the bottom edge of the top in one go.
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.