Monday, July 31, 2017

Burda dress 119, changes to pattern and construction

There were a few changes I made to the pattern prior to and during construction. For those of you interested in the details, this is what I did.

As indicated in the first post on this dress last week, I lengthened the upper body by 1.5 inch. This isn’t hard to do: fold the pleat on the right pattern piece, match it with the placement line on the left pattern piece and you have a full front in which it’s easy to draw a line to lengthen (or shorten) it. I did this just below the armhole. After that the seamlines, diagonal fold and placement lineslines are trued again. Of course this change of length is to be done on the back pattern piece too.
This is not an error in the pattern piece. I know my upper body is longer than average and it’s a change I always do in Burda patterns.

The other change was cutting off the extra triangle pieces that are on the right side pattern pieces for the top, skirt and waist part.

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Initially I cut them and understood what the intention was, an extra pleat above and below the waist inset. In the magazine picture this part is invisible and the line drawing isn’t clear either. I decided that this would probably not make things nicer on me and cut them off. After construction I found this picture on the German Burda site and have magnified this part. For me it was a good decision to take them off, the remaining pleats give enough accent as it is.

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If you do want to remove these pleats you also have to change the small triangle (piece 26) which has no lines. Or perhaps I just missed them.

I used a chalk marker to do this:

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I marked all lines with carbon paper on the wrong side of the fabric, but used basting stitches too on a lot of pieces to have the lines on the right side of the fabric too.

The order of construction for the waist inset is done in the following steps, that are self explanatory if you are using the pattern. (It was at the moment of inserting the inset in the main body/skirt part that I decided not to use those extra pleats, so in these pictures these are still there).

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I used a fabric with a bit of stretch, cutting a smaller size for the torso than I would have done with a woven fabric. It  was very snug and I gave the side seam a bit more space.


Another thing I did was making a couple of horizontal stitches in the back of the pleat in the body. It tended to gape and with these invisible stitches the pleat is kept in place better.

Hope these details are helping some of you.

5 comments:

  1. Helpful, and very clear. Thank You!

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  2. Thank you for clearly demonstrating your process, again. I appreciate you taking the time to document what you do and why you make the changes... the thought process is very valuable to understand.

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  3. Very helpful! Your dress looks great!

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  4. Thanks a lot for sharing these details!

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  5. The dress fits you very well and I like the fabric you have chosen. great patterns for sewing. It looks like something that you can wear to many different occasions

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