I got carried away on pinterest today

I got a little carried away looking at dresses on pinterest.com today. If you don't know, pinterest is a website that lets you link pictures/videos and organizes them into a virtual "bulletin board" type thing. It's a really cool site that you can waste tons of time on. A lot of people use it for wedding ideas/planning and there are a ton of beautiful dresses on it. I use wedding dresses as idea for the basis for my ballroom gowns because they tend to have a more classic look than a lot of the ballroom gowns you can find out there. Also, searching for good pictures of ballroom gowns where you can see details is more difficult than you would think.

So I fell in love with a few dresses:

I love the stoning on the skirt, I'm wondering if I could add some of that to my dress.

I love how the skirt starts right at the natural waist. Very classic and flattering.

So pretty!

And I've had some more thoughts on things I'm going to change. So new sketches to come soon.

Ballroom Costume- Part 2

I made a mock up of the bodysuit in the stretch white fabric, but I'm not going to post any pictures of it because a. I didn't take any and b. the fabric doesn't make it look very good. The white stretch fabric was a little bit lighter weight than the lycra so it showed any little imperfections more obviously. It was a very useful exercise and helped me realize some things I needed to change before cutting it out of the lycra. So I cut apart the white leotard and traced it to make some patterns! Yay!

Front

Side/back

After making some observations on the original pattern, I made adjustments and redrew it. On the left is the cut apart white leotard piece, on the right is the redrawn pattern.

In lycra!

After realizing that I had forgotten to include seam allowance (eep!) I cut out the pieces in the lycra and pinned and basted the majority of it together. And now it's living on a dress form in my family room (thanks Joe!).

It's inside out because it still needs a little bit of adjusting in the front for perfect fit. I also left the crotch open because I haven't entirely decided how I want to work it, I'm planning to do snaps but haven't decided how long I want to make the legs go down, I'm thinking a boyshort instead of the typical leotard cut because I think they are more comfortable. Also because by the time I got to this point it was 12:30 am and I had to leave for class at 7 am the next morning. It's still in the adjusting stages, my motto is you can always cut more off but you definitely can't cut less.

Ballroom dress- the work begins

So up until this point everything was pretty much the fun, happy, glowing stage of a new project where you're planning everything and super excited and it's all you can think about. Today, the work started. I sat down tonight with a mission: to get a leotard pattern on paper. I decided that I wanted to do a leotard with a little bit of a boyshort to it, it covers my bum better and is less likely to cut into my thighs/hips and ride up. I couldn't find any patterns that I liked (that weren't $40, and let's face it, I'm cheap.) So I started to draft a pattern. I've never really made a sewing pattern before. Whenever I knit I always made my own patterns and I read a lot of books on pattern/dressmaking and researched what leotard patterns typically look like. The good thing is, it's supposed to be stretchy and tight, so it should be a little forgiving... right? Let's hope so.

So I spent about an hour and a half measuring myself, measuring paper, sketching on paper, measuring sketches, measuring self again, making adjustments etc etc etc. So I came up with this:

Yay! Paper pieces! And the piece in the middle is intentional, I will explain

The piece on the left is the back/side (there will be two of these sewn together in the back and they will wrap around my sides.) The piece on the right is the center/front (fold on the fabric goes on the dotted line to make one piece twice as wide.) And the liiiittle piece in the center is the crotch. This is by no means a finished pattern, it's a draft that should work in theory, it needs to be tested in practice now.

So this weekend I am going away to IL for my uncle's wedding and I won't be able to actually do any sewing tonight (it's 1 am and I'm so tired just from making this stupid pattern) so I'll get to that next week, hopefully Tuesday. The plan is to make a mock up in some stretch knit white fabric that I have lying around (I'm really not even sure what it's made of, maybe a cotton/polyester blend) so that I can get an idea of if my pattern is working at all before cutting into the good stuff.

Speaking of which, I ordered all my fabric and after a whole little mix up, it came! It is super exciting, here is a sneak peek:

It's like the greenest green ever!