Kickstart My Heart

To say Dust and I have been neglectful of Danseuse would be an understatement. We haven't updated anything in the shop since summer last year. I did seriously consider closing the shop down as I'm very much the kind of person who believes that if you do something you should do it right or you don't do it at all and we weren't doing Danseuse right.

However, we have really great ideas and our designs are different to anything else in the ballet clothing market at the moment, so we have decided to give it one last shot.

We have some lovely materials and are working on creating legwarmers, new skirts and even dresses. Everything is still very much at the testing stage so not quite ready to go into the shop, but I am excited about our new pieces. Here is a little taster...

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Colour Blocked Skirts

I love wearing colour and print for class and I got the idea for a colour blocked skirt after being invited by LaBella Boutique Leotards to design a leotard for them. I chose a very bright and bold pattern for my design (which I should be able to show you very soon) and decided I needed a Danseuse skirt to match, so the idea for colour blocked skirt was born. We are still working on the exact placement of the panels, but the skirts will be a cheerful combination of three colours: neon pink, purple and coral pink. Yum!

Legwarmers

These are much harder to make than you would ever imagine, especially when you aren't machine knitting them. We want to do patterned ones mostly, but only once we source the exact right materials. I love this geometric pattern, which you can buy in the shop. These are 60cm long.

One-OfFs

Another idea we are playing with is having items, probably skirts, where there are literally only one of each size - mega limited edition pieces. Sometimes we come across lovely material but it's much too expensive to buy a whole bolt or there isn't enough of it, so we procure enough to make one in each size and once they're gone, they're gone.

This is a one-off skirt made from some beautiful floral material I found on eBay. 

We are also exploring some beautiful candy striped material for skirts.

Another idea we are looking at is potentially creating some ready-to-wear pieces inspired by ballet. Dust and I talked about that as an idea when we first launched but we are actually going to see if we can make that happen. Of course, these pieces would have Dust's avant garde edge, so don't expect anything frou frou or twee.

I will also take the opportunity to tell you that I have closed the Danseuse blog. That was also sorely neglected as I no longer have the time to actively update two blogs. As you can (hopefully) see, I put a great deal of work into this blog and my posts, therefore that combined with my freelance schedule and dancing, meant Danseuse fell by the wayside. All Danseuse news will just live here now.