Burda Style 02/2013 - 115 Maxi dress

I'm thrilled to hear lots of you are planning to visit Hong Kong, I think I have contacted you all already, but just to extend the offer if anyone is ever here and fancies a meet up or fabric shopping tour please do drop me a note.

Not only have I been sewing a lot recently, I've also just got around to photos so lets catch up on some projects that are in the blog queue.

Back in September last year I first made this maxi dress from the 02/2013 issue of BurdaStyle.

Here's the original Burda pattern :

On my original post I mentioned that I might make it again as a shorter dress.  Usually stating stuff like that on my blog means it will never happen, but this time it did.

Sort of.

I tried this as a shorter dress using some blue snakeprint jersey, it was around knee length before I pinned the hem and looked great  until I tried it on!  It just looked awful, very frumpy and unflattering.  I can't claim to really understand why, but the proportions just did not work - on me at least, I expect if you have amazing legs and washboard abs it would look good, but let's face it anything would!

I still really like the top of the dress and didn't want to waste it so using the leftover strips of fabric I turned it back into a maxi by adding a ruffle cut on the cross grain so that the pattern mismatch didn't look too odd.





There are a couple of other small changes I made - I left off the shoulder gathering to get a bit of shoulder coverage and also left off the waist ties which I thought would not work on a shorter dress.  I would quite like to have them on this longer version, but no fabric so it will stay as it is.

Despite some disappointment along the way I like how this turned out and while I don't need a ton of maxi dresses in my life at least now this one looks a bit different to it's predecessor.