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.