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You've got your choreography, your team is practicing hard, and now it's time to design your dance costume! This may seem like a daunting task, but designing a custom dance costume can really be broken down into 8 simple steps.

If you've been following along our How to Design a Custom Dance Costume series, we've covered everything from prototypes to  fabrics. We've compiled all the posts in this series to give you a brief overview of the custom dance costume design process. Check it out below!

In our recent How to Design a Custom Dance Costume series, we've been covering all the steps to ordering a custom costume.  

Once your design and prototype is confirmed, it's time to get started making your group order! The next step is sizing and measuring your team before your custom costume goes off to production.

Fit is fashion! Even with the most beautifully designed costume, if your outfit doesn't fit properly, the focus will be on your flaws and not your skills. Here a few tips to ensure your dancers are fitted correctly:

If you've been following along our How To Design A Custom Dance Costume series, we've previously covered finding inspiration, design consultations, and fabric choices.  Up next in the process is the prototype! 

A prototype, or sample garment, is the best way to ensure your team's final group order turns out how you you'd like. 

Your costume company loves prototypes because they need to figure out how to pattern and construct your custom costume.  And you'll love the prototype because you can make sure your custom costumes look and feel great before proceeding with the full order! 

We answer some common questions about dance costume prototypes below: 

One of the most important aspects of a performance is how you feel in your dance costume.  The more comfortable and confident you feel, the better you will perform!  A costume that is flattering on the entire team is one way to make sure your dancers look and feel 100%, and elevate your performance.  Here are some tips for designing dance costumes that will look good on the entire team!  

You have your dance costume concept selected and illustrated-  Now it's time to choose fabrics!

Regardless of the look you are trying to achieve, the best fabrics for dance costumes incorporate spandex.  This ensures that your form fitting garment can MOVE with you when you dance.  The fabric you choose depends a lot on your costume concept - do you want something edgy and futuristic (think hologram accents!), or lightweight and elegant (think sheer mesh!).  

Below, we break down our go-to fabric options that most costume companies have available.  There are plenty of novelty and specialty fabrics out there that make amazing costumes - but here are a few of the tried and true basic favorites that will work for any dance costume!

One of the most common questions we hear is this: how long does it take to get a  custom dance costume?! There are a lot of different factors that can contribute to lead times for dance costumes, but generally speaking a design-from-scratch custom dance costume will take 12-18 weeks from gathering inspiration, to production, and to performance.   

A design-from-scratch custom costume is a great option for teams that want a truly one-of-a-kind look, and have greater flexibility with budget ($250+) and time frame (12-18 weeks). Instead of choosing between pre-stocked and catalog styles, this is your chance to become the designer yourself!

There are other custom options that can save you time, like customizing fabrics on a pre-designed style.  For more resources on costumes with quicker turn around times, check out the related post The Best Costume Options For Your Time Frame. 

If you decide a custom costume is right for you, we've broken down each step with time frames below, along with a few tips for saving time!  

 Green Bay South West High School found inspiration for their 2015 pom uniform in a Nike shoe!

Inspiration for your next dance costume can come from anywhere: the runway, your Instagram feed, a sneaker, or that gorgeous peach that's sitting on your desk. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming to narrow down your focus, and create a performance concept that is unique from your competitors.  To help, we've rounded up some of our favorite resources for finding dance costume inspiration, as well as some tips to get it all organized! 

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As we head into competition season, we've gotten a lot of requests for the crowd pleasing Transition Costume.  Transition Costumes deliver that WOW factor to the crowd (and the judges!) that everyone likes to see. But they're also COMPLICATED! How do you even begin to design one? Find out what the most effective transition costumes are, and some tips for designing them below! 

Rhinestones are the perfect finishing touch to any costume, but often the biggest question we hear is: how many rhinestones do I need? It's a tough question to figure out especially when:

• 100 gems sounds like a lot, but is actually on the low end of the price spectrum,
• Design illustrations can be poor representations of a finished rhinestone design because it's difficult to represent gem size and placement accurately,
• Minor tweaks in spacing can drastically effect the quantity of rhinestones.

Planning the new upcoming dance season is SO exciting!  Many times this means designing a new costume, which means a design consultation with your dance costume design company. You will likely be getting a lot of information out of this design consultation- but how can you prepare beforehand? Find out here!