Belly Dance Costume - Skirt

I have a belly dancing performance on Friday (wish me luck). It's a production at the end of the course where every group will perform one dance to show what we have learned.

I drafted the pattern for the skirt following the instructions from the book Skirting the Issues. I made a full circle skirt with two panels. Usually it's three, but I bought the whole fabric from the bolt and there wasn't enough to make three panels.

This is the photo of the pattern piece, it's 1/2 of the circle and it's huge:


The skirt is made of two different layers, the darker one on the outside and the lighter one on the inside, to lessen the see-through quality of the fabric.



Fabric used: 100% polyester
The fabric gave me lots of problems. I had so much puckering, I managed to get it almost to none at the end, but still... I was so mad. I tried using starch on the fabric, but it didn't wash off completely, so I decided not to use it.
Using the sharp microtex needle helped. I let all the seams dry and cool off flat after pressing, which also made the difference.

Construction: I used the French seam on the side seams. The skirt is not finished yet. I will let it hang over night, add the elastic at the waist and hem it with rolled hem.

I'll post the pictures of the finished skirt tomorrow.

Harem Pants - Self-drafted

This is the final trial version of the harem pants for my belly dancing class before I cut into the pretty fabric. These pants are wearable, I already wore them to a class last week and everyone absolutely loved them. I already received a request from another girl.

I followed the instructions from the Pants for the Dance book I wrote about in my previous post. I started with a pattern for yoga pants, morphed together both, front and back, sides to eliminate the side seam, widened the pants and dropped the crotch. The book encourages you to start with a commercial pattern so there are no actual measurements, except recommendations for widening the pant leg. Which means that everything I did was pretty much an educated guess.
Two days later I found this diagram on the internet:

credits: http://www.zilltech.com/FAQCostumeHP.html

I measured my version of the pattern and realized I was off by mere 0.5cm = 0.2in. (Sweet!)

The pants really simple to put together. There are 2 inside seams and a crotch seam. For the waistband and the ankles I folded the fabric and inserted the elastic and voila! my own custom-made harem pants. It took me less than an hour to put together.

Fabric: I used a gauze-like cotton fabric I had in my stash for a while.

Here are a few extra pictures:
front:

back:


Here you can see the width of the pant leg:


Detail of the elastic at the ankle. You can also see the fabric here:


I'm planning on making the same pants from this polyester fabric:


The darker fabric will be on the outside and the lighter will be used as lining.
Construction wise, these pants will be more challenging because of the see-through quality of the fabric. Although I have seen the seams on the store-bought pants simply serged together, I'm leaning more towards the French seams... I'll try and see which will work best.

Blouse Sloper

I've been working on my blouse sloper for a long time. Now, with some time off work, I've finally finished it.

I drafted the pattern myself using the Rundschau technique. The biggest problem I faced was my bust and measurements connected to it. For example, armhole width is derived form bust circumference. In my case, my bust is big (I'm D cup), but my arms, back and waist are small.
It took a lot of tweaking and re-drafting to finally get to this:

front:


side:


back:


On the photo of the back, please ignore the right side of the photo - I made adjustments only the left side of the blouse lol

I'm not entirely satisfied with it yet. Do you see the puckering on the top of the darts on the back? I still need to fix that.
And also if you look at the side photo, there are some lines at my waist. I'm not sure how to get rid of those. I've tried taking in the sides and widening the back dart; it looked fine, but I couldn't close the blouse anymore.

Still some minor details to figure out, but, overall, I'm happy with the results.