Skip to main content

Burda Dress #121 with Marbled ITY Stretch Fabric

New week new dress?

That's kinda what's been happening lately! I've just been having fun cutting out sewing patterns and making them up. I mean, why not?!

The latest dress I finished was Burda's Fitted Sheath Dress #121 from June 2015. I have (no joke) had this dress design printed up and posted on my bulletin board for almost a year now and I finally made it!


 I've been working far more with stretch knits lately and this was a perfect pattern to keep up on my skills with. It was simple, easy, and super-quick to sew up!

What I love about this dress is that the fabric I chose was a horizontal print and with the way the pattern bends in shape to accommodate the rouching, the print essentially becomes vertical up at the bodice portion. So cool! The fabric is an ITY stretch knit from fabric.com. It was very easy to cut and work with! I will definitely look out for more ITY stretches in the future.

I have a little over a yard of this left and I definitely need some new tops. I might make some more of the same top from the New Look pattern I used a while ago for my Viewmaster top for leftover fabric!

 

Something new for me to sew up in any pattern was a gusset. This is less so the kind of gusset I am used to seeing in pattern making books and feels more like a styleline. Either way, I unnecessarily confused myself with it somehow until I walked my pattern along. I think the notches/seam allowance threw me off while sewing (maybe I was tired?) but I felt like such a dummy after walking my pattern and seeing exactly what I wasn't doing right.


Pattern flat sketches.

 

See the gusset?! They really are a nice touch to an otherwise very simple dress. 
 

 The shoulders also do a nice accidental almost-chevron too! 


I didn't make a muslin on this one -- totally just wung it. I cut a size 34 (I could have been ok with a 36 too) and the only edits I made were making the neckline higher, taking about 4" off the bottom hem, and instead if "making a backing strip", I used the clear elastic I used for my stripe rouch top from earlier this year to get the gathers to stay put. 

Weirdly enough, I sewed this dress primarily on my sewing machine after fiddling with my settings and testing on scrap pieces of fabric. I do own and use a serger, but I used the serger here to finish off the edges and then sewed the rest on my machine because.... why not?!

I used a zigzag stretch stitch to keep the fabric stretchy and then did a faux cover stitch with a double-needle on the sleeve and bottom hems. I think how to sew stretch knits on your machine will be my next blog post on The Art Shake so you can see in-depth the process I have been using come September! 


This will be a fun one to wear! 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Latch Hook Rug Update

A little under a month ago I received all of my supplies to take on one of the biggest long-term projects I have ever taken on - a self-designed latch hook rug. I don't know why, but I am clearly nuts. So beginning today I am posting photos each month, (preferably on the 1st of each month) progress of this gigantic shag rug. See how I started it here (scroll down past posting of my $10 dress).  This is a photo of it today:  Yes, I used the candelabra for scale. Haha.   This rug is really soft and is fun to run your fingers through.  It doesn't look like much was accomplished, but though the number of packages we have gone through of pre-cut latch hook rug yarn already I have calculated that  we've used over 2500 strands for this ie.) 8 packages. I also just ordered 10 more packages of lime green since that's what I ran out of first and 6 more packages of straw yellow. There is still quite a bit to go, but you see the blue row squares? Each of th

DIY Trapeze Dress

I'm a pretty big fan of tent dresses (or trapeze dresses - call it what you want). They're simple, easy-to-make and you can have many variations of them. These are a fun style to wear for spring and summer!  See this DIY from a Good Housekeeping Crafts book from 1971 - photos at the end of my own trapeze top from a while ago! (Bear with me on the photos here - this book is quite cumbersome and hard to scan.)  Applique patterns, in case you wanted the dress to look EXACTLY like the photo. (But why?)  How to cut the fabric efficiently. (This is actually pretty important cost-wise for you - especially with something this big.)  Using pattern instructions from my patternmaking book from college, I created this swingy trapeze top a bit ago. I used sweater fabric from a thrift store find for the collar of this top.   I also opened up the back on the pattern to have a diamond shape.   It can easily be belted like in this photo fo

Shingo Sato and the Art of Transformational Reconstruction

So I got really excited on my break at work today when I got an email from Burda about a webinar they're doing on a pattern technique called "Transformational Reconstruction" developed by Japanese designer Shingo Sato. I hadn't even heard of Shingo Sato until today let alone his design technique but oddly, it's sort of the path I'm going down with my designs anyway as seen with the Sunrise Panel dress as well as the Petra Dress and the pattern making involved in those designs. What I did there is perhaps a "light" version of Sato's where the darts and shaping are hidden in the seam lines. If you've been reading this blog long enough, you know that my design aesthetic focuses largely on color blocking, unusual seam lines, and a love of anything psychedelic. Note: All photos stolen from the internet. Sorry! I'm super-excited. Let me know if it's yours and I'll take it down.  Shingo Sato teaching.  More designs using