Non-Linear Journey of a Linear Minidress

Hello all! My name is Anna and you find me on our family sewing blog PeterSilie&Co (IG: @petersilieundco). I am really bad with sewing plans and sticking to time tables. But when the theme month came up last year, I decided to participate, and I therefore have to deliver something. I said “I will probably sew a hoodie-sweater-dress with this amazing fabric I have in my stash”… But 3 months is a long time to change plans. And I got fed up with sweater fabrics, because of two similar projects before. So today, there is no striped sweater-dress. Instead, I have (just for you) finally finished an UFO.

It all started in (I think) July of last year. I had just seen the preview of the latest issue of burdastyle and there was this dress: fun, cute back detail, maybe a bit short and “American shoulders” in the German version — whatever these are called in English. I was just so in love that my boyfriend had to make a bit of a detour, so I could pick up the magazine right at that moment. It was a Sunday, ~19:50, the only place open was at the train station, closing at 20:00.

The beginning was really quick: tracing cutting, sewing… Even the direction of the stripes was decided really fast. The biggest issue was the order of when to sew what. A typical burda problem. I had to hand sew the inside of the shoulder seam and I am 100% sure that there is an easier and neater option for getting the facing in — maybe the burrito method?!

Fitting was quite funny. According to the measuring table, I needed a bigger size for my bottom than for my bust area. I decided to use the smaller one, to get a good fit on the top part and added a seam allowance of 1.5 cm for any adjustments needed. Fitting was done by my mom via Skype and the help of my boyfriend, who never ever used a pin before. He held the pins as if they were poisonous. So he got a short sewing lesson in how to operate a pin and fit a dress. We had a good laugh about it and most importantly we got the job done.

The only thing that I did not have at home at the time was the zipper. In the original project (see here as reference) it had a metallic one on the back. The next shopping trip showed how hard it could be to get a nice metallic zipper. So I decided on a invisible one. Since this was my first ever invisible zipper, I bought a special foot for my old Bernina lady, read a lot of tutorials and phoned my sister quite a few times, and then basted it in wrong (like a normal zipper…)! Motivation was gone.

Anyway, this put a sudden break into my otherwise quite fast sewing project. At the time I actually already started writing a blog post, because I thought: “This will be the first time that I get something ready, while the magazine is still available in the shops.” A goal of mine since the beginning of blogging, and it had never happened until now. Since than I deleted the post, brought the dress home to my mom, left it there with the zipper, and went home quite happily without the dress and more or less forgot about it.

During my Christmas holidays I got the idea of using the dress for this blog post, because I was quite fed up with sewing sweaterknit fabric. My sister helped a lot by sewing in the invisible zipper (thank you!), and I used white bias tape from my mom’s stash for the hem. And then there was only one problem remaining: how to photograph a super cute, but very short, summer dress in winter. We postponed it from weekend to weekend, but than we just got it done. It was cold, we had a little mishap with a showing facing and fought a bit with reflective windows. But the photos turned out really well in my opinion.

By the way, I finally cut into the striped sweater fabric and it was really great to sew with!

Happy stripe sewing,
Anna