Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Dance Recital Sneak Peak: Preschool Flowers

I have been up to my eyeballs in tulle and satin for the past few days! Lucky for me I got to take a break Sunday-Monday and head to the lake for some much needed time off! Thank goodness I have my husband to keep me grounded and FORCE me to take some time off sometimes!

Anyhoo... my Mum and I worked on the preschool ballet costumes this weekend. There are five classes of preschoolers, and each class will be themed around a different flower: Daffodils, Cherry Blossoms, Bluebells, Lilacs, and Roses.

Each girl had a bag with their name and class on it, their hair accessory, and all of their costume pieces ready to sew. Here are the daffodils and cherry blossoms waiting to be sewn...

My dear friend Heather was amazing and spent much of last week cutting satin petals... thanks, Heather! They looked like this...

I serged two sides of the petal with the wrong sides outward, then flipped them right side out and pressed them. I then serged the tops to close them. It was my first serging experience - I was so proud of myself! There were a LOT of petals - so it was good practice!

The pattern called for two rows of petals - 15 petals in total per skirt. We put the first one together, and it just didn't look right...

You could hardly see the tulle, for one. And the way the pattern had us arrange the patterns was very strange, they didn't really look like petals at all because they were all sweeping to the side. Also, the skirt was SO HEAVY. We were concerned about little 3 and 4 year-olds wearing them and being comfortable...

Soooo... being the creative geniuses we are, we re-wrote the pattern a little. We used one row of petals, and spaced them differently. We were VERY pleased with the result. Here's a rose...


And a little daffodil...

They're just so cute! But I know that the cuteness factor will go up even further once the little ones get them on, and have their headbands on too. I can't wait! Thanks to Mum - for all of the help! She's the sewing queen!

2 comments:

Meg@MegaCrafty said...

OH- my gosh Joanne!!! These are the most adorable costumes. When I was a kid in dance I would have been thrilled to get a costume like this instead of the horrible catalog ones- those ones never looked like they did in the books. These, I'm sure. look even better than the pictures

Wow what an effort!

Joanne said...

Aw, thanks Meg! And yes - they DO look even better in person - and just imagine them with their little flower headbands to match! :)