Irish Dance Dress, Part One: Color and Inspiration

Back in October 2014, Maeve placed 1st in her Beginner 2 Reel and 2nd in her Beginner 2 Slip Jig, meaning that she could move up to the Novice level in those dances and that I could start planning out her Novice or 'solo' dress. If you're not familiar with Irish Dance, most schools require dancers to wear a school outfit, or a black skirt and white blouse at the lower levels. At a certain point as she progresses, a dancer may be allowed to wear a 'solo' dress - something that is usually made specifically for the dancer and which is an original design. It's bad form to copy others' dresses, though it's understood that there are only so many original ideas under the sun and that there are only so many color combinations that can be made. Styles can vary, particularly with the skirt, and dresses are often highly jeweled with Swarovski crystals. A non-jeweled new dress would be considered okay at the Novice level but probably not at a higher level. Such a dress would run in the neighborhood of $500 at a minimum. I saw a name-brand used dress at a feis in January that was priced at $500. Most newer dresses with a small amount of crystals will run you around $1000, off the rack. Custom-made dresses will cost considerably more, with $1,200 to $1,500 not considered unusual.

Maeve's ideal dress, as I mentioned in a previous post, was a lovely $1,200 dress made by Prime Dress Designs - cobalt blue velvet and satin with an orange-red embroidery. She loves this dress, so I decided to use it as an inspiration and jumping-off point.

Inspiration dress by Prime Dress Designs

The first thing was to find the correct color. I managed to find a beautiful blue dull satin at Mood Fabrics at quite a reasonable price. Then I started a long and exhausting search for the proper color blue velvet. This took a while but I was able to find some on the Fabric Depot website and purchased it while in Portland at a Feis in January. The orange was something I came across by accident  - a stretch satin in a color called "Neon Tangerine" from Fabric.com. The embroidery thread is Sulky in Orange Flame. For this dress I also needed an underlining and a lining; the underlining is a pale blue poly-cotton and the lining is red-orange poly-cotton broadcloth that I got on sale for $1.99. Both are from JoAnn's. For sparkle I also got some Swarovski crystals in cobalt blue and in fire opal (a red-orange blend). You'll see those at a later stage.

The thing that was hardest was figuring out what kind of motifs I wanted to use. Maeve prefers the more traditional-style dresses with Celtic knot work, and I was able to find 2 that we particularly liked in a book that we have - they are adaptations of actual knots from museum pieces. The chest piece is an adaptation of an interlaced pattern from the Lindisfarne Gospels, which date from the late 7th century. You can see that in the British Library in London, England. The original design was more complex and I wasn't sure that I'd be able to execute it well, as it's my first time doing this type of thing. Scott pointed out to me that instead of the double line I could simply make it into 1 thicker line and it still works. This motif will be an appliqué of the orange satin on the bodice, which will be a combination of the blue velvet and blue satin.

Bodice appliqué design

The second motif will appear in small size on the sleeves and in a larger size as the shaped cape. This is an Anglo-Saxon design, taken from a bronze-gilt bookmount that dates from the 8th or 9th century. The original piece can be found in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. I have chosen to use this motif in an inverted orientation in order to emphasize the bell-like shape of the sleeve, but also to give it the appropriate weight so that it doesn't look top-heavy.

Sleeve embroidery design.

I know I've talked a great deal about the bodice and its embellishment, but that's because I'm waiting for the pattern for the skirt support structure. The dress pattern is from Feis Dress and I'm using the princess seamed bodice. The skirt will be a skater skirt but it will still need to have support. Luckily for me I came upon a wonderful Yahoo group of people who make Irish dance dresses and everyone recommends the 'skirt frame' pattern that one of the members has created. I've ordered it and am now just waiting for it to come from Ireland. Meanwhile, I'll try to document the steps of making this dress as I go.

In-VEST-ed

Apparently I fell off the face of the blogosphere because I haven't posted anything in about 4 years - which is also about how old my youngest is, so there's clearly a correlation. I'll try to catch up on older things I've made but in the meantime, I want to talk about my latest project, which actually paid me money.

So I've mentioned that my oldest does Irish dance. We've moved since I last posted, and her new dance school is SO much better than the old one. In fact, the old one no longer has a location where we used to live. We switched regions and my daughter has moved into Prizewinner in her Reel and Slip Jig and is hoping to move out of Novice for her Treble Jig and Hornpipe. Last December she competed at the Southern Region Oireachtas in the Traditional Set competition; this December she'll be doing solo competition, and I'm in the process of making a new dress. I'll try to document this as I go. Having already made her a solo dress, I learned a lot and sometimes I get asked my opinion on fit for dresses, as well as for the boys' equivalent - the vest/waistcoat. A boy in our new school wanted a vest and tried one on - my opinion was that it didn't fit and there wasn't a lot of room for him to grow  - important, because his genetics are likely to make him a tall drink of water, and at 13 he was liable to have a growth spurt at any moment. His mom didn't buy the vest but a few weeks later I got a call that she was interested in having me make one for him. I accepted it.

We met and I got his measurements, plus we talked about design and color. He wanted a wolf design but our instructor nixed the idea of a realistic wolf. She encouraged him to look at Celtic designs but he didn't find a Celtic wolf he liked. He focused on the design that was on the vest he'd tried on - one that had two dragons. I explained that I couldn't copy the original but would work a design that was similar.

The original design:

My first attempt had the tails curving toward the back and then coming up through the center, in a "W" shape. He didn't like the tails coming up - he wanted them to go down. I was bummed because I liked the sinuousness of the shape of the body - very Loch Ness Monster.

My next attempt was different and was unsuccessful - I didn't even show it to my clients. I started over and went in a slightly different direction, which ended up in the final design:

I feel that this has a good Viking feel to it, almost like the carved prows of Viking ships.

Once we got the design approved I had to find someone to digitize it for my machine. Now, I only have a 5"x7" embroidery field on my machine. That means that any design that is bigger than that has to be split. I took the design to a local guy who runs the sewing machine sales and repair shop because I was told that he does digitizing, too. They sell a digitizing program for some ridiculous amount and he teaches how to use it. Well, I can't afford that program and it doesn't run native on a Mac and my Windows computer is ancient and slow - not fit for the task, honestly. Anyway, I asked how much it will cost to digitize and told him my machine size and he seemed reluctant to do it, saying that he could do it but not split it and that I would be better off having someone else embroider it for me. Of course, that costs money and I honestly didn't quote enough to do that. And anyway, I wanted to do it myself, if only for the experience. To top it off, he offered the solution of buying some pre-made design that was bigger than my hoop and then having someone embroider it for me.

Um, no.

So I contacted an amazing woman named Ann, who is a member of the Irish Dance Dressmaking group that I belong to and who has a business digitizing. She was very excited and really liked the design. She digitized it and then we worked out the kinks. It was, to be honest, very difficult (okay, so the local guy was sort of right). The problem was that she had to find the right spots to split the design and some of it was a continuous line, which makes splitting more difficult. The other part was the number of times I had to re-hoop it, since the design could only be done in small pieces at a time with my machine. We thought that maybe we'd be able to use my 5"x12" hoop, but we couldn't get it to line up - literally .5 mm difference! What a killer. In the end, we decided to just use the 5"x7"  hoop and the front of the vest had 9 splits and the back had 11. I now have calluses on my right hand from tightening the hoop. The finished product is amazing, though.

Vest front

Vest back

The dragon design is done in a non-metallic silver polyester thread by Floriani and the turquoise, blue, and green colors are rayon Sulky thread, embroidered on black microvelvet. And, of course, no Irish dance garment is complete without crystals. For this project I used Swarovski crystals that I purchased from Dreamtime Creations. The larger stones are size 30 and are the Blue Zircon Shimmer color. In the green sections I used size 16 stones in the color Fern Green Glacier Blue. The darker blue crystals on top are Capri Blue and on bottom are Bermuda Blue, both size 16. The turquoise sections are a mix - some are Blue Zircon Shimmer and some are Blue Zircon Glacier Blue, also both size 16. There are also clear crystals in sizes 16 and 20.

That's about it for now. I'm going to try and get together posts about the (first) solo dress I did for Maeve and all the work that went into that before I start any on the process about the new dress. And of course there are many other sewing projects that happened in the past 4 years which I'll attempt to address. I may end up consolidating a lot of them.