When I began making dresses for this production, between the Baroness and the Samba, I KNEW I had a perfect dress to use for pieces:

This dress has been in my stash a long time . . . I bought it when my kids were in middle school, and were still excited about dressing up for themed Homecoming events.  Unfortunately, we never needed it.  A couple of years ago, I was helping someone with a last-minute dance costume and we tried using one of the sleeve puffs as a skirt decoration, so it was already relegated to a “parts” dress.  I have already removed the additional purple and black bead-and-sequin flowers from around the neckline and base of the skirt.

To begin, I removed the second sleeve, and detached  the ruffled skirt pieces.  The piece on the left was attached to the sequin fabric, and the piece on the right was attached to the lining.  (My apologies for the poor pictures in this post–I am not sure what happened to the lighting).

I found another simple “little black dress” to use as the base.

I removed the rhinestone decoration from the waist.

The ruffles were attached to the skirt to give a hi-low angle.    I often use safety pins to hold heavy pieces together when I am combining garments.

I attached the under-ruffles first, and then the top ruffle.  I had to release some of the gathers on the top ruffle so that it would fit.

Next I cut strips of red lace and very generously squish gathered it along the top of the black ruffle.  Red string sequins were added to the edges of  the ruffles.  An extra piece was added to one of hte sides to give a little something extra.

I attached the ruffled sleeves to the base dress (the white with the spot is the shoulder of the dress form).

And a little red sequin trim along the neckline:

And, another dress was done:

 

This costume was very quick to make, and fulfilled my goal of using the cut-up purple dress.  Now I just need to do something with the purple sequin part, lol.  I also like it because it is very reflective of the red dress that the Baroness is wearing.  They both have puffy “sleeves” and the shape of the ruffles skirts.  I had plenty of red lace, so I just cut more strips as I needed them, so I didn’t have to divide out my quantity and try to make the ruffle even.

This would not be my favorite as a stand-alone dress, but I think it will work well in the ensemble.