Latin Dresses: Pippa – Part II

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In my last post on these dresses, I showed my dress without the crinoline and without any embellishment.

The First thing that got added to the dress was some crinoline, thankfully this arrived during the day on the weds and I could add it to my skirt so that Cheyenne could get the full effect of what the skirt would look like and we could work out how much to take off the dress length so that it would fit her.

You can see how much of a difference that the crinoline makes to the skirt:

Esmerale Dresses
Esmerale Latin dresses
Esmerale Latin dresses

You can see that there are two coloured skirts once the crinoline was added. But as the black fabric is a different material to the coloured material it is a bit more staticy and the two skirts tend to sit on top of one another. This was only found out once they were made and I tried dancing in the dress. For Cheyenne’s dress, I made the black skirt an inch or two shorter so that they were different lengths which stops them sticking together as much.

Crinoline is a wonderous if not highly awkward product to work with. Here I am wrangling 8m of crinoline under the machine. I fold the crinoline in half and sew a long basting stitch along the edge to hold it folded in half, then I sew it onto the edge of the skirt, stretching the lycra ever so slightly. If you stretch the Lycra more you will get more of a ruffled edge to the skirt, but I didn’t want that too much on this skirt. I then top stitch the edge to stop the crinoline from flipping up…

Esmerale Latin dresses

Since I had two days to make the second dress and add some visual interest to the dresses I opted to use some black appliques which came off a previous dress that I cannibalised. I felt that the black flowers would go well with the black skirts.

These appliques were large black 3D lace flowers which had at one point had some rhinestones on them but only glue residue left now. I added rhinestones to pick out the design more, and to cover up the old glue marks, these were added to the flowers before I sewed them onto the dress as it is easier to add the rhinestones when you have a flat surface. Tbh I did add more stones once I had put them on the dress and I had more time, but adding more stones later is a perpetual task in Latin Dancing.

Esmerale Latin dresses
Esmerale Latin dresses

Not that Cheyenne didn’t have faith in me, but after trying my dress on on the Weds evening and working out what changes were needed for hers, she wasn’t 100% sure that I would have the dresses ready for the competition on the Saturday so she brought her other dresses with her just in case! But thankfully I did have both of them ready with some added bling on them, and a shoulder strap. (We will just gloss over the fact that this was only safety pinned in place until just before the last comp of the year!)

You can really see the difference in how much of the underskirt shows on the two dresses. I haven’t summoned the motivation to take all that black crinoline off mine and shorten the skirt, to put it all back on again, yet. So for the rest of the year, I pinned one section of the top skirt up to show off the lower skirt and stop the two sitting directly on top of one another.

Esmerale Latin dresses

Next time, more Rhinestones…

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8 thoughts on “Latin Dresses: Pippa – Part II

  1. tialys

    Wow! That crinoline does make a big difference doesn’t it? After studying your photo of it looking like some sort of pallid snake about to eat your sewing machine, however, I don’t think I’ll be rushing to use it any time soon 🙂

    Reply
    1. Pippa Post author

      Lol. What an image.
      Fishing line does a similar thing but to a smaller extent. And looks less snake like before being sewn on.

      Reply
  2. Al

    Would it work with a non circle skirt? I’m thinking of using it with a mermaid skirt but it wouldn’t be a full circle at the bottom. Also, would it only work on fabric that is bias cut?

    Reply
    1. Pippa Post author

      This fabric is not specifically bias cut. Being a full circle parts of the skirt edge are on the bias to the grain and some of it is along/across the grain, but since it is a 4way stretch material it doesn’t need the grain to provide stretch.
      So it depends if your fabric is a stretch material or not as to whether you would need to cut on the bias or not.

      Yes it would work on a skirt that isn’t a full circle but the amount of volume that it puts in would differ, but I don’t know exactly how much this would affect the final outcome.

      I hope this helps slightly and would love to see how it turns out.

      Reply

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