Let your vision come to life!

This was such a fun, yet challenging project. This costume was designed for one of the cast members who is not just a ballerina, but also an aerial dancer. So we knew we wanted to create a unitard and use two different coloured fabrics to create the illusion of a snake. In the images below you can see that we started out with a couple of designs to figure out what stylines, curves and shapes would best achieve that and I think the final design really gives the illusion of a snake crawling around a tree.

Although the pattern was sewn in less than an hour, the pattern drafting took about two hours, because you have to think so carefully on where to “cut” the next section and if it will achieve the look you are going for, but it was so worth it. We first drafted a basic leotard, a sleeve and a pair of leggings. Next we merged the three pattern pieces together and started to draw the different stylelines according to the design. Then we started with the tedious separation of the patterns, soon the different “puzzle” pieces became too many and we realised halfway through, that we will have to number the different pieces and add markings at each styleline to keep track of where every pattern piece should go. And of course, don’t forget to add seam allowance for EVERY separation line, on both pattern pieces.

We used two different types of fabrics for the unitard, a basic black lycra/spandex and a printed viscose lycra. The best choice whenever you create a garment with a lot of different stylelines is to use similar fabrics, because if one fabric stretches a lot more than the other, you are firstly going to struggle to sew them together and secondly most probably it will create crease lines which again create fit issues. Unfortunately, we could not find the correct print in lycra, but luckily we found this viscose lycra with a snake skin print. Apart from it being heavier in weight, it has similar characteristics than lycra, so we simply just used an overlocker to stitch the seams together and a twin needle to top stitch the elastic around the neckline.

I hope this post inspires you to experiment with colour blocking and different stylelines.

Thanks for reading!

PS: The feature photo is from the dance production “When Life Happens” by LesDanseuses Adult Ballet studio. Photographer: Carla Nel Photography.

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