Another Burda pattern–dress from the January 2017 issue

Most of you who have been reading my blog for a long time know that sometimes I get so enthousiastic about a pattern that I want to sew it immediately and often do that as well. This dress was in the enthousiastic category, but was not made immediately.

The main attraction for me was in the upper part of the dress. What a lovely neckline and raglan sleeves are something different too. As stated earlier, when I showed the first in progress photos, pleats on the hips and a point emphasizing that part on the back are not for me.

These are pictures from the BurdaStyle website.

I made my version in a fabric with a stretch very similar to a ponte knit. I bought it at the Utrecht fabric market. Two friends bought exactly the same fabric, I’m looking forward to see their versions. Very difficult to make good pictures, the colours are black and very dark navy. The sun made these photos brighter.

The fit is not too bad, as always the wrinkles are showing more when you’re standing still and in real life it doesn’t look that bad. I lengthened the body a bit too much this time, the waistline could be slightly higher and the back a bit narrower. Note to self: next time draft it from my sloper. Sometimes it’s just easy to trace a pattern ;).

I want to wear it with a small belt, but have none in my possession that suited this dress.

In the back I opted for a zipper that doesn’t go to the neckline completely. Not necessary to get my head into it and at the same time making the step of sewing it accurately so that there’s no unevenness at the end of the zipper unneccessary. I need the zipper for the waist.

I changed the pattern and construction of the neckline facing. For those interested, these are my changes.

I made a neckline facing for the back and sleeve togehter. There’s a little extra fabric as the sleeve parts do not exactly match, but I considered it not enough to add a dart.

For the front I made a separate facing too. Sewed the facing to the front first and then sewn both the sleeve and the back facing in one pass. I hope you can see it in the next photo, it’s very hard to explain and photograph. The bottom layer is the back with the sleeve attached, then you see the front (with facing side up) and on top is the back neck facing. After you turn this it has a nice and crisp corner. No fiddling with points to clip in.

To conclude the skirt part. For this I used my skirt block, but any pencil skirt pattern that fits would do. Usually you will have one dart in the front and in the back pattern (I use two but that’s not too important here). I moved the darts so that they started at the same point from center front and back as the top of the dress. Then I just cut down to make a seam in the same line as the princess seam from the top and made sure the waistlines matched. I could have sewn the dart only, that’s just a design option/choice.

Describing all this makes it seem like a lot of work, but it’s not that complicated. It’s a dress I will wear a lot this winter.