I’m feeling a little upset that the September BurdaMag preview has yet to show up on either the German or Russian Burda websites, so I’m handling this situation in typically diplomatic Selfish Seamstress style: by picking a fight.

Burda, here is your version of the 12-2006-108 tux dress:

And here is the Selfish Seamstress’s version. Don’t get me wrong, Burda. Obviously you are the geniuses behind this dress and I fully acknowledge that, but I think I WIN:

See how smug I look?

Look- even my back looks smug.

As usual, Burda provided a wonderfully drafted pattern. I graded it down to a 32 and the fit is just perfect without any alterations except for shortening at the hem and dropping the waistline about an inch. Oddly the bodice was really short before that, and that was without any petite alterations.

While I was making it, I was trying it on with my orange shoes just to check the length, and surprisingly, I really like the dress with these shoes. It’s extremely unintuitive to me, not because of the plum, but because of the gray. I never think of gray and orange working together. But Dan commented as well (without any prompting or query from me) that the dress and the shoes look unintuitively good together, so don’t try to tell me otherwise because I am not listening. I am a WINNER. Albeit a bowlegged one.

I think the photo of the skirt material I showed in the last post about this dress gave the false impression that I was using a rather coarse herringbone tweed. That’s not the case, though that would have been a great look. No, this dress was meant to use up remnants, and the skirt is actually a rather heavy rayon suiting with a very fine herringbone weave.

Here it is with no Selfish Seamstress inside:

As you can see, I made a few small cosmetic changes. I omitted the bow at the waist (though now that I think about it, I don’t think it would have looked so silly as I thought. But I do like wearing this with a skinny belt and the bow would prohibit that.)

I had meant to do the little skinny bow tie around the collar, but then I realized I’m never ever going to wear this with the collar closed all the way (makes it look very much as though my head is just balanced atop the collar), so I had to skip the neck bow because it would have just been two untied strings hanging off of either side of the collar. I also changed the placement of the buttons accordingly. Here’s a close-up of the collar:

I realized later that I actually installed the top collar ruffle wrong side out, which just means that the less neat edge is showing. The fabric itself is the same on both sides. Oh well.

And here’s a glimpse at the inside- I did French seams wherever possible and skipped the lining. Instead I used self bias strips as armhole facings. You can see that I hand tacked them at the shoulder seam to keep them from flipping outwards when I wear it:

Anyway, that’s about it. No hard feelings, okay Burda? You can’t win them all. Especially not with moiré.

Advertisement