Tag Archives: Burdastyle Magazine 05-2010-101

jingle bells

07/12/2015 6:10 am \ 33 Comments \ Carolyn

Yes, my new shirtdress literally does have bells on it. The gold buttons are mini jingle bells, the type you put on cutesie wootsie Christmas decorations. Whimsical and impractical although many of my sewing/knitting choices may be though, jingle-bells are just kinda… hmmm well the jury’s still out. See, I just had my heart absolutely set on small rounded gold buttons and this was pretty much it. I love the festivity of them and am clearly all set up to do Christmas Day with fabulous, jingly panache, but have fears that the relentlessly cheerful chirpy tingalingalinging will become a tad annoying in the interim, and not just to me but to the long-suffering souls who move in and about in my everyday orbit. So I have not at this stage ruled out carefully injecting a blob of superglue into the opening of each jingle bell, to anchor the ringer thingie to the inside and restore peace and tranquility unto the world.
Glue is on standby and at the ready…

but pretty, non?

Fabric: a very fine coral floral silk georgette from Fabulous Fabric, the very last on the roll. I bought it using a voucher given to me for my birthday by my dear friends; whom I’ve been meeting every week since our children were in the early school years… They know my strange predilection for self-dressmaking so very well! I also bought some ivory crepe; with which I made the slip to go under this dress, and which I also used for the button placket, the cuffs and the collar stand. Jingle bells were also from Fabulous Fabrics.

I’m so relieved I had the foresight to make a separate slip to wear under this sheer dress, rather than an attached lining… why? because when I go to hang the clothes on the clothesline I’ve found this to happen…

Hmmm, see; the slip, being sleeveless, does not ride up when you lift your arms up over your head, of course. Just yet another reason to keep a healthy collection of nice slips and petticoats handy in the lingerie drawer. I have about four hardworking slips currently in rotation and just lately I’m seriously considering increasing the population, particularly since some of the oldies are getting… well, old. Maybe even double that number wouldn’t be too many. Slips, seems such a quaint and old-fashioned thing, yeah? the kind of ladylike frippery my grandmother loved and would buy for my birthdays etc and that seemed unnecessary and even rather fuddyduddy-ish to my much younger, more foolish self. Now I am wearing them. Am I getting old? Hmmm, no need to answer that!

arms in regular position, all is well

Pattern: Burda 05/2010;111, a shirtdress pattern I’ve used twice before, a plaid shirtdress and a lace version; with sleeves adapted from another Burda pattern, 05-2010-101. I’ve used this same sleeve pattern also twice before on different, other Burda patterns; my black Pirate shirt and my pale blue silk shirt. This is that same sleeve but cut shorter and with a shorter cuff to compensate for being a shorter sleeve.
I chose to leave off the pockets, and the collar and just have the collar stand, I felt this lends a slightly more feminine look to a shirt, goes better with all that girly pink floral explosion that’s already going on in there.

Construction notes: I went with all French seams throughout of course, silk georgette kinda demands those sorts of standards! being sheer and all high quality and all. Only the armscye seams I overlocked the raw edges to finish. In a shirting cotton or linen I would flat fell the armscye se am like so, but silk georgette just does not lend itself to that level of tailoring.
Collar, button placket and cuff facing were hand fell-stitched to secure them; I wished for no top-stitching to sully that clean-finished, pristine crepe! In my opinion, topstitching makes a shirt look a lot more casual and maybe a little masculine? whereas absence of top-stitching keeps a thing looking polished and, somehow feminine. I know, that’s kinda irrational and I cannot logically explain why I have that masculine/feminine impressions of topstitching, but there it is.
The hem is hand-rolled and stitched, and I did the same technique as I did for my slip, with stay-stitching. I hemmed this before I hemmed the matching slip, to get the right length for both, but it’s taken me this long to finish all the other little details and get out and take photographs of it.
And I also wanted to wait for its first outing to be a day on which I would be meeting all my friends to show it to them, and simultaneously an appropriately weather-ed day, nice enough to wear it! it’s taken a while for those two things to coincide. Today was that day! hurrah!

Details:
Dress; Burda 05-2010-111, Burda 05-2010-101 sleeves, floral silk georgette with ivory crepe detailing, my original review of this pattern here
Slip (under); the Ruby slip, pattern by pattern scissors cloth, ivory crepe, details here

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: Burdastyle magazine 05-2010-101, Burdastyle magazine 05-2010-111, daily outfit, dress, Sienna

Billowy black shirt, with skulls

06/04/2011 5:04 am \ 32 Comments \ Carolyn

I’ve made a new shirt.
But I can’t do any reviews, because this shirt is based on not one pattern, not even two patterns, but three patterns. A conglomeration of patterns. The united states of patterns. You’ve heard of a meeting of the minds? This is a meeting of the patterns. A little bit, hopefully the best, taken out of each and the production of a mongrel, but better, (stronger, faster) shirt…
I knew in my head exactly what I wanted; I wanted a billowy pirate-y type shirt, inspired by the cute little skull buttons I bought in Japan. The buttons are miniature silver skulls, but each is wearing a tiny little silver crown, so the shirt had to be not just piratical, but kind of majestic at the same time to make it worthy of these completely wonderful buttons. Don’t you just love these buttons? You cannot get buttons like this here… I need to go to Japan more often.
The fabric is a thin self-patterned black cotton/synthetic mix that was one of my Christmas presents, bought by me, for my son to give to me for Christmas (hey, we’re practical when it comes to gift giving around here…)
I’m wearing it hanging out over my skirt here, to show it in its full length with the gently curved hemline on show, but most probably I will wear it tucked in a lot of the time too…
I put the technical details of making the shirt below, if anyone is interested.
Oh, the shoes. These are my highest heels, at 4 1/2″. They put me at over 6′. I adore these shoes, and decided I am going to wear them more often, just because. Of course I didn’t wear them to walk the dog. But I wore them to do my other daily and office activities. They are a lot more comfortable than they appear.

Details:
Shirt; Burdastyle 10-2010-102, collar from Burda 8218, sleeves from Burdastyle 05-2010-101, made of black self-patterned cotton mix with skull buttons bought in Japan
Skirt; Vogue 7303, olive corduroy, to see this skirt styled in 6 different way go here
Shoes; Kron by Kron Kron, bought online

The shirt; so it’s probably pretty complicated so you can skip this technical stuff unless you really want to reproduce this for yourself… like a lot of seamstresses I like to take a little bit from here and a little bit from there, and manipulate the patterns I have to get the look I want..
I saw this lovely graceful classic shirt pattern 102 in Burdastyle magazine 10/2010 (right, top) and liked its loosely elegant body with no body darts or shaping. But I wanted a shawl collar rather than the classic one in the pattern, thus the hunting down and finally locating Burda 8218, the only shawl collared shirt pattern available here in Perth, or so it seemed… and for the sleeves, I wanted something gathered and billowy, but three quarter length, so used the lower part of the bell-shaped gathered sleeve from the dress pattern 101 from Burdastyle 05/2010 (right, lower). To cut the sleeve cap to fit into the armscye of the shirt pattern, I laid down the sleeve pieces from the shirt pattern 102, to get the sleeve cap part of the sleeve right. It is a two piece sleeve, but I just laid them together with the stitching lines abutting. The other sleeve from the dress pattern 101 I laid down on top with the underarm points matching those of the shirt sleeve pattern, and just used this to cut out the arm part of the sleeve with the bellshaped hemline (see below), and I also used the sleeve cuff from the same dress pattern 101. Except when I had finished the shirt, the sleeves didn’t sit exactly how I envisioned, they sagged a bit low and I really wanted for them to look really billowy and like they were pushed up to the elbow permanently. So I added an in-sleeve tab on the sleeve seam which pulls the sleeves up to gather just that little more fully and gracefully at just below elbow length and sit up right where I want them. I only had five of the skull buttons so I had to use different buttons here, these are purply-grey natural shell buttons.
The shawl collar, well, obviously I used the collar pattern pieces from Burda 8218, and cut the shirt front facings, front neckline edge and back neckline edge to match those of this pattern, otherwise the collar wouldn’t have fitted… This only took a little bit of adjustment and it was not difficult at all to match the collar from one shirt pattern to the different body of the other shirt pattern.
Et voila.

(the sleeve at left; the two shirt sleeve pieces underneath were laid together along the stitching line to get the sleeve cap, at left, and the lower edge of the sleeve piece was cut off at the curved hemline of the piece on top)