tutu construction

Creating the Basque for the skirt was harder than I thought the pattern drafting was pretty simple but when it came to creating the Basque everything seemed to go wrong.  I accidently cut off too much of the seam allowance on one side for the placket so was unable to turn the fabric in on its self to create it. At least I will know not to do it next time!

Gathering the net on the skirt was slow at first but once I got into the swing of things it seemed to be quite easy the only thing slowing me down was sometimes catching some of the skirt whilst sewing my net onto my Basque.

Before                                                                                 After

This is a before and after shot of my romantic tutu now it just needs to be levelled.

decoration work shop

During our decoration workshop I got to experiment with different braids, beads, laces and fabrics to try and portray different characters. I found that creating ballet decoration quite time consuming and at the beginning hard to put materials together to portray my chosen character.  Some materials I found were easier to work with than others such as the white braiding on the Aurora bodice was rather hard as it didn’t go into the shape I wanted easily.

This ballet bodice front could be used for the character Aurora from the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Even though the braid was hard to work with I think it works well to create a very pretty design. The ribbon on the other hand was really easy to work with and the ruching gives the piece a bit more texture adds to the pretty girly theme.

This bodice design has a Spanish feel to it so could be used in the flamenco section in Swan Lake. After creating our designs we were shown how to attach different materials with different stitching. The main thing when creating ballet decoration is that the stitch has to be nearly invisible meaning tiny stitch which is why applying decoration is so time consuming.

sleeves

Fig 56 is the sleeve that i'm going to create as part of hand in.