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…
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!
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 seam 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
