Shadowing Day 9

It is crunch time today because the Christmas show is tomorrow night, but they have to have everything ready for the dress rehearsal before that.

The flowers from last week that we were gluing in place were spray painted red to look like red poinsettias for Christmas, and had been covered in rhinestones. They turned out amazing!

The dress that had the triangle sequin pieces from last week were built into the skirts and the dresses were finished. There was an added fun aspect to them, in which they included a skinny light rod into the side of the skirt where that triangle was, so while the girls are dancing, they can hold onto it and lift up their skirt. It ends up looking like the skirt of an angel. The red flowers we made will be held by the girls wearing theses dresses.

The red dress here will be used in the finale of the Christmas show. 

The dress has a double circle skirt, which means it has twice as much fabric as a normal circle skirt. This allows for more movement and makes it look fancy and dressy.

This red dress requires a slight fitting for the dancers, because the twisted portion on the front of the bodice needs to be tacked in place, so it lays right over the bust area.

Kat started out by being in charge of putting the red dress on the dress form to pin the twisted portion in the front in place, then she would transfer to the sewing machine and tack it in place.

Today Claire came in and started working on the sleeves for the red dress. She needed to cut out the fabric for it. The sleeve would end up being a flutter style sleeve, and would be sewn onto the straps of the dress just underneath the twisted portion.

After a little while, Jocelyn was asked by Sister Knight to let her take over the task of sewing the skirts, and asked Jocelyn to help pinning the rest of the blouses to the skirts. There were about 12 dresses that still needed to be pieced together, so I was able to help with this task.

When pinning the skirts to the blouses we made sure the seams were out of the way of the center front and back, and put a pin on center front and center back and then the sides. This would serve as a guide when going to put the blouse onto the skirt.

We also made sure, if there was a tag on the skirt, that we put the tag seam to the right of the zipper, so when worn, the tag would be on the left of the zipper. This will make it easier to locate when the dresses are returned.

When we finished pinning the skirts onto the blouses, we would hand them off to Sister Knight, who would then sew the pieces together. That is when Kat would take the dress and pin the twisted bust portion into place.

Once Jocelyn and I had finished pinning all the skirts onto the blouses, Jocelyn was asked to take over the tacking portion that Kat was doing on the sewing machine. This would help the work go by quicker, so Kat could stay at her station with the dress form, then pass them to Jocelyn to tack them in place.