Latindress, gold star 1

A while ago I had my ballroom and Latin dance exams, and because, as I mentioned before, I don't want to wear the same dress to the same venue twice, I decided to make a new Latin dress.
Follow the progress below!

Patroon

First, of course, I needed a pattern. My mum has an original pattern, but as I wanted to start relatively soon (two weeks prior to the exams), I decided to draft my own pattern on what I remembered of the original, namely it being a leotard and an eight-panel skirt with triangle inserts. Drafting the pattern started by tracing one of my leotards on wrapping paper, lacking actual pattern paper.

Leotard on wrapping paper

This eventually resulted in a front and back pattern, which I cut in half just below the waistline for attaching the skirt.

The skirt pattern I made in Word, yes, Microsoft Office Word. The pattern is made up of a trapezoid and a rectangle combined for the eight panels, and isosceles triangles for the inserts. Using a little maths, I calculated the width and hight of all parts so they would fit the fabric. To make placing the pattern pieces on the fabric easier later on, I printed them all four times to be able to fit them all on the fabric at once.
For the next time I have decided to increase the height of the triangle and the rectangle, and decrease that of the trapezoid, so the skirt will open higher up.

Cutting the fabric

Then it came to cutting the fabric. I had one meter of blue viscose jersey laying around which I ordered from stoffen.net (myfabrics.co.uk, € 9.95/£9.95 per meter till 10 m) and decided to use this for the Latin dress. First I cut the leotard pieces, after which I laid out the skirt pattern pieces and cut these as well.

Pattern pieces on the fabrid

Putting it together

I sew all pieces together using a narrow zigzag stitch as the jersey is stretchy. After the skirt, top and bottom were put together, I sew the skirt in between the top and bottom.

The three seperate parts

Three parts together

For this dress I wanted a low back, and because I kept the pattern for the leotard top relatively simple, I used chalk to draw the back how I wanted it to be.

Straps

I decided that I wanted a more special pattern with the straps on my back. To achieve this, I cut four, 3 cm wide straps. At first I wanted a one-shoulder dress with all four straps coming from the left shoulder. However, after trying on the dress, it turned out that I also needed a strap coming from the right side of my dress and one going horizontally across the back to prevent gaping, and, TMI maybe, to keep my boobs in place while dancing.

Creating the straps

I, again, stitched the strips of fabric using a narrow zigzag. To turn the straps, I took a safety pin, put this through one end of the strap, and finally pulled the safety pin through the tube, which resulted in a nicely turned strap. I attached the strap going straight across the back on one side with two poppers, so the dress would be easy to put on, and the strap would still be tight. The black fabric shown in the picure below served like a bra and was made from a cheap stretch bra-top (Zeeman, €2.99).

Back strap with poppers

Bling

A latin dress without any decoration or bling is very boring, so I decided to sew on silver and blue-silver sequins with a silver bead on top (all Gütermann). I used silver-coloured thread for this, which in the end turned out not to have been the best choice, as it was quite weak and several sequins fell off during the night.
First, I drew on the pattern I wanted in chalk (can still be seen slightly in pictures below), and then sew on the sequins with 3 cm in between.

Front dress with detail

Dress back

Below two pictures of me wearing the dress during the exams, showing of the fit.

- Love, Marieke

The pictures in this blog can be used linking back to this website, but cannot be published as own material.