Burdastyle in scuba

The above dress is from the 2017 August edition from Burda. It’s the first Burdastyle magazine I got and it’s a really good edition with some beautiful dresses with retro touches and interesting details.

I made this dress before:

That version was made in a teal ponte and I wear it at least once a week.

Now comes the part I’ve been debating myself about: how honest should one be on a public blog? Usually when I outright don’t like something I just don’t blog or post about it online. I don’t feel I need to be negative about things I don’t like when I can be positive about things I do like. If you give attention to things you love these things will grow. But the fact that I didn’t like the fabric of the dress I made is instrumental in how I ended up feeling about the dress. I love ponte and stable knits and sew with these all the time, but I loathe scuba. I worked with it once and I would describe the feel of the fabric as ‘blegh’. I really don’t like the synthetic feel of the fabric and the synthetic way it moves and drapes. I don’t like the feeling of it on my skin either. That one dress I made never got worn. When I thought about making that dress into a Grainline Morris blazer I changed my mind during the cutting (and touching) of the fabric and just chucked it into the bin. So when someone gave me two metres of crepe scuba I was not delighted with it. But I also didn’t want to be ungrateful and I tried to think of a suitable pattern for this fabric, maybe something to wear in winter so it wouldn’t feel sweaty, just nice and warm. I decided on making another version of this Burdastyle dress and here it is:

Construction wise this is a pleasure to make. It’s really straightforward and there are no complicated bits. I understand people find the instructions sparse, but for a dress like this that doesn’t matter. This is my only experience with Burda so far, but I am looking forward to making a lot more patterns from the magazine. I subscribed to the magazine after buying the September edition too and every edition has at least three garments I really love and want to make. I don’t love the tracing, but Swedish tracing paper does help with seeing the lines.

I still don’t like scuba. Since making this dress I’ve had it in my hands three times when deciding what to wear for the day and all of those times I chose something else to wear. The sponginess of the fabric really puts me off. I don’t think I will wear it a lot, maybe I’ll end up not wearing it all. No more scuba for me. If I do end up with scuba again I’ll just give it to someone who does appreciate it.

Burda adjacent?

Burda Style had this really pretty dress with draped elements in their January magazine.

But I didn’t have any fabric in the right yardage. My jersey stash is running pretty low, but I still have so much fabric that I don’t want to buy anything new at the moment. So I took the element that I loved, the knotted detail, and used the Agnes top as a base for a dress with an A-line skirt. I drew a pattern piece for the knot with the width of the waist of the Agnes top, like this:

I cut it out on the fold, then fiddled about with the placement until I was happy and sewed up the sideseams with the ends of the knot and presto!

I will probably end up making the original pattern too, but for now this will do nicely.