Burdastyle Wings Dress

It seems to be at this time of the season, when all of my seasonal wish list items have been made up, that I start looking through my extensive Burdastyle collection looking for inspiration.  This inspiration can be either looking for patterns for specific fabrics in my stash or patterns that would work for items I have seen in rtw.  In this case, it was the former.  I had this lovely but extremely vibrant piece of cotton sateen in my stash for probably close to five years.  I initially thought I would make it into a jacket but really, I don't wear jackets much in the summer and this piece of fabric really screams summer.  My Burdastyle magazines are all marked with Post-it notes marking the patterns that are of particular interest and Burdastyle 04/2014 108  jumped out.  I had seen Handmade by Carolyn make this one up in a lovely and equally bold Marimeko floral and used an inset strip between each panel to highlight the seam lines.  I wondered if this would work with my fabric.  I definitely had enough of it.

After checking my measurements against Burdastyle's I discovered that I was a 38 in the upper body and 40-42 in the lower body which I knew would make this style challenging to fit.  I chose to draft the bodice to a 38 and the skirt to a 42 and worry about the fitting later.

I found the perfect colour of blue Poplin at my local Lincraft and as a bonus it worked out at $4 per metre.  I bought a metre to make both the seam inset strips and the bias tape to hem the skirt and face the armholes.  Once I cut the dress out, I realised that the print is off grain and wandered downwards across the width of the fabric.  Luckily this is a busy print and it is less noticeable on the front than the back.  I think the inset of blue actually breaks the pattern up nicely anyway.

This was not exactly a quick make and I sort of made up the order of construction as I went along.  It did require a fair bit of tweaking the pattern to try and get all of those seam lines to line up.  To make my job somewhat easier, I opted not to include them in the side seams.  Just as well I didn't because even though I baste fitted it, I decided after I had the entire dress assembled that the skirt needed to be taken in by quite a bit and I actually had to remake the pockets which is a bit of a shame because they are not quite as nice as my first attempt.  I  had a bit of a disaster when reassembling the side seams.  I accidentally cut off 10cms of the skirt hem with the overlocker when it got caught up in the side seam.  How I did this I don't know and it is something I can't remember ever doing before!  There were swear words said!  My skirt front is now a hem length shorter than I had intended.  Just as well I was generous with it in the first place.

One thing that really bothered me with this dress, and it may have had something with the need of a forward shoulder adjustment, is the boat neck gaped a bit at the front.  To fix this I stitched a sneaky dart in the middle of the neckline.  It is not really noticeable and hopefully looks just like a seam to the untrained eye.

I chose to stitch down the front flaps as far as the pockets as I felt it sat better over my hips and stopped it flapping in the breeze.

I only finished this dress last week and didn't think I would get much wear out of it with the autumn eminent but with the summer showing no signs of disappearing, it may get some wear yet.