Making my own leotard and skirt! A tutorial 💕💚

Hi everyone, I just stared ballet again after a 5 years hiatus and to celebrate I tried to make my very own leotard! Since it was a lot easier than I expected I thought to make a small tutorial on here to help and hopefully inspire some of you. The project was easy. It took me around two hours to make the pattern (but you can find some premade online), two hours to sew the leo and one more to make the matching skirt. (But you can find So if you have a sewing machine somewhere around your house (or your grandma’s) I highly recommend giving it a try!

What I used: - I choose a four way stretch jersey fabric for both the fashion fabric and the lining of the leo.
- Chiffon fabric to make the skirt (remember that it has to be lightweight to bee able to see your legs) - Matching threads of course - Strech needles for the leo (90 measure to be exact) and regular needles - 8 mm elastic; I used the regular prim one but if you can I’d go for a softer one - Bias strip (mine was satin but it can be any material)

For the pattern I used this very cute Paperstxrs tutorial online. Since it’s for a top I sent drafted the bottom using on of my other leotards. If you don’t feel like patterning it yourself you can find some premade ones online (I will link some but I haven’t personally tried them); one piece swimsuit patterns should also be fine. After cutting the fabric, for the actual sewing part I mostly followed the YouTube tutorial: sewing the top and bottom bodice, sewing front and back together, sewing the crotch (of course that’s not in the video), making and attaching the sleeves and then hemming the top part with the elastic. To hem the leghole I used the same exact method. Since my fashion fabric was a bit lightweight I also made I lining, and treated it as one singular piece with the fashion fabric (it’s called flatlining: here some more infos). For the skirt I followed another Paperstxrs tutorial; the only difference is that for the waistband I used bias tape: basically I sandwiched the chiffon fabric in the bias strip. If you have any questions I will gladly answer.

Happy dancing and happy sewing!💚🩷