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Tuesday 27 May 2014

Burda Style 02/2013 - 115 Maxi dress

I'm thrilled to hear lots of you are planning to visit Hong Kong, I think I have contacted you all already, but just to extend the offer if anyone is ever here and fancies a meet up or fabric shopping tour please do drop me a note.

Not only have I been sewing a lot recently, I've also just got around to photos so lets catch up on some projects that are in the blog queue.

Back in September last year I first made this maxi dress from the 02/2013 issue of BurdaStyle.

Here's the original Burda pattern :



On my original post I mentioned that I might make it again as a shorter dress.  Usually stating stuff like that on my blog means it will never happen, but this time it did.

Sort of.

I tried this as a shorter dress using some blue snakeprint jersey, it was around knee length before I pinned the hem and looked great  until I tried it on!  It just looked awful, very frumpy and unflattering.  I can't claim to really understand why, but the proportions just did not work - on me at least, I expect if you have amazing legs and washboard abs it would look good, but let's face it anything would!

I still really like the top of the dress and didn't want to waste it so using the leftover strips of fabric I turned it back into a maxi by adding a ruffle cut on the cross grain so that the pattern mismatch didn't look too odd.





There are a couple of other small changes I made - I left off the shoulder gathering to get a bit of shoulder coverage and also left off the waist ties which I thought would not work on a shorter dress.  I would quite like to have them on this longer version, but no fabric so it will stay as it is.

Despite some disappointment along the way I like how this turned out and while I don't need a ton of maxi dresses in my life at least now this one looks a bit different to it's predecessor.















13 comments:

  1. Wow, great save! I love the bottom ruffle cut on the cross grain - brilliant idea. Lovely color on you too.

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  2. Amazing fabric for your dress and so glad you got it to work!

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  3. The save looks like it was meant to be and the cross grain ruffle balances nicely with the twist detail at the top. Lovely dress and the colour is great on you!

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  4. This looks like the perfect maxi for the summer season ahead!

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  5. Allison, I'm a maxi fan, This is such a beautiful dress!

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  6. What a great save! I like the wider shoulder too.

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  7. Fabulous! Good save too.

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  8. Cute! Glad you were able to make it work.

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  9. Love the final product, your 'design element' works perfectly. Your final product is terrific.

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  10. Just gorgeous! You've picked the perfect fabric for this dress. Love it.

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  11. Just gorgeous! You've picked the perfect fabric for this dress. Love it.

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  12. Great dress, Allison!! I actually bought the same dress from Seraphine.... Was it hard to make?

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