Adventure in Tutuland

The eighth-grade history fair happens tomorrow. The way this works is that each student dresses up in character as a prominent American (in Utah, eighth graders study US history), and makes a poster with several facts about their subject, but without the individual's name. Parents and other students then tour around and talk to the kids and fill out a form with their best guesses as to whom each of the historical personages is. The person who gets the most right wins some kind of prize.


The Daughter decided she wants to be Maria Tallchief. Well, first, she said she wanted to be Misty Copeland, but I suggested she choose someone a little more... historical. Lest you think that Grownup Bunhead's influence leads the child only to think of ballet-related figures, let me just tell you that last time (in fifth grade), she chose to be Jane Addams.

Also, this has been the spring of her ballet awakening. She is finally on pointe, and taking lessons every day with hopes of getting into the junior company in the fall.

So, what does a reasonable mother do when her child decides to be Maria Tallchief for history fair?

I don't know. I am not that person.

A quick search of Google Images led to the decision to make MT's Odette costume. How hard could that be?

Lots and lots of tulle

A quick search of Google "How to Make a Tutu" returned 108,000,000 hits (approximately), none of which began with the phrase, "this quick and easy project."

So it was off to the sewing store for about 18 yards (a conservative amount, in tutuland) of stiff tulle (unfortunately, real tutu netting is not available at JoAnn), some satin, and white feathers. As I was paying for our purchases, I quickly looked up how much a white practice tutu would cost on Discount Dance Supply's website. The answer was gratifying: about $55-$65, and that's before any additional frou frou that you want to add. Our cost came to about $30, with tulle 50% off at 75 cents a yard.

Following instructions from the fantastic "tutu-torial" at the blog Never a Dull Moment (http://sharpsewingny.blogspot.com/p/tutu-torial.html), and also inspecting many, many other tutu-construction blogs, pinterests, and discussion threads, we began by drafting a paper pattern for a pair of, well, satin underpants. In the classical language of tutu construction, these drawers are called caleçons de precaution. Underpants of precaution. Hahaha!

caleçons de precaution with butt ruffles!

This is not my pattern, but it basically looks like it (except that we went with only 8 layers of tulle, since I am not completely insane). Also, as Daughter said she did not want "butt ruffles" we dispensed with what are labeled ruffles 1, 2, and 3 on the above pattern.

Precautionary unders cut out and fitted to the meager hams of Daughter, we marked the sewing lines. And then, dear reader, the work really began.

We cut  EIGHT strips six yards long in graduated widths (12", 11", 10", 9", 8", 7", 5", 3") out of the tulle. Sadly, our upper two layers we chose to make out of a softer tule, which as you will see merely looks sort of limp and wrinkly. Use stiff tulle, my friends.

dagged edge

Next we "dagged" the layers. Making one inch accordion folds and swearing under our breath (well, I was swearing while she was singing "I wanna be like Kanye"), we cut each set of folds on a 90 degree angle to the edge in order to get a nice zig-zaggy hem. Since this is meant to be a "feathery" tutu we did our dagging a little more irregularly than the petal-like perfection of the pink tutu shown on the right. No, actually, we did it more irregularly because dagging turns out to be really, really difficult. Daughter's father said, "Thus the expression "Dagnabit!" as we struggled with the wayward netting.

Pants with first two layers of tulle

So, the next step was to make twenty million or so 1" pleats in the tulle strips, machine basting those down, and then doubling over the pleats to achieve fullness. There is nothing terrible difficult about making pleats or basting them down, but it is very boring. We moved on from "I wanna be like Kanye" to an in-depth plot analysis of the Dr. Who episode, "The End of Time," (or rather, Daughter moved on while I grunted, "mmhmm" with my lips clamped tightly over pins). We sewed and sewed and the layers of tulle ruffles took form.

Five layers and counting

We attached the tulle to the pants, beginning with the second row down from the top, which you sew with the raw edge facing the waist. Then you sew the first row on over that, also with the raw edge facing the waist. The other layers, made of the stiffer tulle, we sewed with the raw edge facing the... well, facing down. This gives the tutu its lift, so to speak.

As the layers went on, something really cool started to happen. The underside of the tutu started to look almost exactly like it was supposed to look, like all those pix on the internet, serried layers of fluffy loveliness, like a freshly-opened rose. It was seriously, seriously poofy.

Once we had all the layers attached (and we did not make it to the 3" layer, because we simply ran out of pants to sew it onto), we checked the fit and attached the basque. What is a basque, you ask?

Basques in basques

Well, according to Wikipedia, a basque is (among many other things), "a long corset, characterized by a close, contoured fit and extending past the waistline over the hips. It is so called because the fashion was adopted from Basque traditional dress, initially by the French and then throughout Western fashion." Both Daughter and I recently read a book called Dance and Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele, and in its introductory essay on the tutu, one of the things we learned was that the construction of tutus closely mirrored the construction of fashionable women's dress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so it's unsurprising that a tutu would have what amounts to a built in girdle. This is what allows the skirt to emerge not at the dancer's waist, which would be a disaster for partnering (a handful of scratchy slippery tulle could easily prompt the partner to drop the ballerina mid-lift, or precipitate a sudden loss of grip resulting in an awkward and probably painful slide of the hands upwards...), but just at the point of the hips, lengthening the torso (graceful) and making it seem as if the legs emerge not out of the angular architecture of hip and pelvis but instead out of a cloud of delicately sidestepped anatomical vagueness.

Basque attached to skirt

 With the basque in place, we then adjusted the fit at the waist with a little elastic and some hooks and eyes. This was actually one of the more difficult steps, for some reason. All that tulle was bristling about, and getting a smooth fit over the hips was a challenge. Also, somehow I managed to sew the bra-extender hook-and-eye unit that we purchased on in such a manner that it would not hook or eye, so that had to be carefully removed and reattached (more colorful language on my part while Daughter talked on the phone with her bestie about when they were going to get together to watch (rewatch) "The End of Time").

The underpinnings

You would think we were almost done. But there were still the rear seam and leg-holes of the pants to be stitched up (always fun when you're trying to deal with a wayward cloud of tulle. We didn't elasticize the legholes, since by some unbelievable miracle they fit just right, but I certainly wouldn't want to dance in a tutu without a little more of a guarantee that nothing would be uncomfortably exposed as I rode around on my cavalier's shoulder in a rather ass-upwards position!

At this stage Daughter also tacked the layers of tulle together so that her tutu didn't look like a giant powder puff and had more of a flat-pancake shape. We're still working on this -- most "real" tutus that have that classic Russian shape have a hoop discreetly hidden in about layer 4, and also have lots and lots more layers, plus butt and ahem, shall we say "front"? ruffles. Ours is a little droopier, due to lack of layers and somewhat overenthusiastic tacking.

The final stage was fun. We decided not to make a bodice at this point, but instead to have her wear a white leotard that has been adorned with fluffy boa loops over the shoulders and a fake-bodice front in the shape of a V. This is not because we are lazy. Or, yes, it is. Or because we ran out of time.

Ta da!

As you can see in the photograph, we adorned the "plate" of the tutu with two wings (we had just been down to see Ballet West, and in the lobby of the Capitol theater, they have the actual tutu that Taylor Swift wore in her video, "Shake it Off" and I think that was the inspiration), covered with white feathers and gold frou-frou. The skirt still needs a bit of taming -- the back has a bit of a duck, or, er, swan tail where it needs to be joined, but I must say, it was impressively like the real deal. She rushed to put on her pointe shoes and to strike a pose (many poses) and I took this picture. I would show you her head-piece too, but I respect our privacy at least enough to keep her face off the blog. It's really good, is all I can say, and she made it from pipe-cleaners, feather boa, feathers, and glitter glue.

Taylor Swift with actual ballerinas from Ballet West

Now that we've done this, would we do it again? YES! It was a fun project, took about six hours total, and included lots of great mom-and-daughter time, during which I learned more about Dr. Who than I ever needed to know, and she learned more about my dirty mouth than I ever wanted her to know. For our next project, though, it would be fun to create a costume for a real production, complete with the pieced bodice and real tutu tulle instead of the iffy stuff from JoAnn. I think we still have a lot to learn before we can start selling our wares for $400 a pop and up on Etsy, like some people do, but at least we can dream. And speaking of dreaming, if you're a tutu-enthusiast, this video from Australian National Ballet is so worth the four and half minutes of your life it will consume!

The ironic thing about our tutu adventure is that when we went to the ballet on Saturday, the program was Balanchine's Square Dance, Fonte's Almost Tango, and Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. Not. One. Single. Tutu.

And that was kind of nice, too.