June Burda of the month: panelled dress 6/2013 #117

Ta da! June Burda project finally completed.  Yeah I know it's actually the middle of July, but the good thing about a self imposed challenge is that there's no real harm done if you miss a deadline by a little (or a lot!).

I realise the colourblock trend has been around for quite a while now, and I've probably either come in at the tail end of it or have missed the boat completely, but I don't care because I quite like the look. I was heavily inspired by these dresses that I had pinned sometime ago:

I used Burda 6/2013 #117  with a few changes to take it from a summer dress to a winter dress which is more befitting of our current weather:

As soon as I saw this pattern I immediately thought of a colour blocked dress, the only problem being what colours and fabrics to use.  I've proudly made this all from stash fabrics - a grey wool flannel and a white textured wool/polyester blend both bought from Spotlight ages ago, and some black wool crepe leftover from some other past project. I lightly interfaced the black wool crepe to give it the same weight and body as the grey and the white fabrics, and while there's a lot of texture within the one dress I think it works pretty well.
 

Sewing this dress was just like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle, albeit a fiddly one. Getting the yoke and the white side panels to line up at the side seam and zipper required some hand basting to get the panels to line up and not slip when I sewed them. And sewing those white panels in to the grey fabric was really hard to do - the corners are a bit more rounded and not as pointy as I would have liked, and now that I'm looking at these photos I can see that the left side front corner is puckered which I'll have to redo although it's not as obvious in real life.

I changed the pattern to have a centre back seam with an invisible zipper instead of cutting the back piece on the fold and putting a zip into the side seam. I did this mainly so I could do a small swayback adjustment, but also because I don't like side zippers all that much.  I only did a small swayback adjustment because the body of the dress was quite narrow at the waist line, and instead I treated the vertical seams of the white panels as darts, and deepened the back seams a bit to get a closer fit. The dress fits like a glove as you can see from the side view, although there is a little bit of fabric pooling/rippling at the back:

For the sleeves I just used the pattern pieces from a previously traced Burda pattern. I did check whether I needed to alter the armscye to fit, figuring that it would be a slightly different shape for a sleeveless dress as opposed to a sleeved dress but they were exactly the same. I guess Burda uses the same basic block for their pattern designs which is useful to know.

The original pattern is for an unlined dress, with the neck and armhole openings simply turned and top stitched down. Because I've made this from wool and I always wear pantyhose during the winter I lined the dress from the yoke down in a light grey lining fabric from the stash, making the black yoke doubled so that it also acts as a facing to the neckline.

It took me such a long time to sew this dress, thanks to a cranky toddler letting me only sew in short spurts here and there. But overall I quite like this dress, and might make it again in summer from a cotton fabric in a sleeveless version as per the original pattern.

And now onto the July Burda, hopefully done in July and not August......