Burda 05/2010 103 Shirred dress

Despite all my whining about Burda there are still some hidden gems in there. I suspect most of them stay hidden to me thanks to the sometimes crazy photography and styling, but I think I have unearthed another winner of a dress in the May issue.

This is dress 103 also available as a tunic (104). Burda used lined chiffon but I made mine in a silk print which I left unlined. I made a 38 with no alterations - yippee - the only part where this dress is fitted is elasticated so it's easy to fit.

I made a couple of minor changes - I left off the sleeve bands simply because I liked the look without them for this particular fabric. (The underarm is quite low though so if that bothers you then the drapy sleeves will help). Instead of the self ties in the back I added a few rows of shirring in the centre to match the front of the dress.

I should add that I didn't use Burda's method of zig zagging over the shirring elastic and instead wound it onto a bobbin and used my machine. If I make this again I will join the bodice and skirt seams before doing the shirring because using my shirring method makes it a bit awkward to do the seam afterwards per the instructions.

Since my dress is unlined I had to finish the v neckline somehow and used a strip of fabric to make a binding - I'm really happy with how this turned out. I found this Burdastyle tutorial for a knit binding really helpful to explain how to get the nice v. My method was slightly different since I was doing a narrow silk finish - I used a single layer strip and slipstitched it by hand to the inside neckline before doing the mitre stage. I hope this will make sense when you see their tutorial. Also amazingly for Burda I didn't find the neckline too low on this one.

This is a bit more of a girly dress than I am used to wearing but I really like it and may well make another or even the tunic and take advantage of some of the great silks available here in HK that I always love looking at and never know what to do with.