Time for Spring/Summer Sewing

Some of you may notice I took a hiatus. There were life changes, including packing and moving the sewing room, and that created a short term road block to sewing.

But it’s now time to look forward and sew for spring and summer. I tried on last spring’s dresses and decided I needed to evaluate my basic patterns, so I had an appointment with Marla. We fitted Burda 7433.

While the pattern has interesting collar variations, the front panel can also easily be modified to a plain scoop neck. Every time I use a Burda pattern, the advantages become clear – primarily that the drafting is so consistent among the patterns.

Because I wear dresses almost exclusively, I lengthened this pattern using the Alabama Chanin Wrap Dress as a guide. I added width as needed and then also off-grained the wrap edges.

Off-graining is a process of adding fabric to a free edge of fabric in a garment – these edges tend to not hang straight, so fabric is added to give the illusion of a straight hang. A place to start is adding 1/2” to the width at the waist and grading to blend up toward the bust and then drawing a line to add as much width as needed to the hem (see Carr’s book Couture for more information).  For this project, about 3” were added by the time the line extended to the hem. You can see the addition to the center front piece on the right. This works for jacket fronts, too. (I didn’t take a pic of the center back piece, which was very similar to the AC pattern.)

Then I sewed up a muslin and was happy with the result! Feeling successful was a great way to get back to sewing.